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I took kindly to woodworking. In fact, I was brought up in the woods until I was seven years of age. During these first seven years of my life I saw my father only occasionally, for he was a cabinetmaker by trade and worked in a smart little town about sixty miles distant from our forest farm and came home after intervals of about six weeks to remain with us but a day or two. When I was about seven years old my mother died and the remainder of the family father took with him to the town where he worked.

I went to school, but had a chance to run in and out of the shop as I pleased, and just about as the child learns to speak his mother’s language by sights and sounds long before it is sent to school, so I learned a great deal about cabinetmaking long before I took any tools in my hand to actually learn the trade.
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Charles Reade has asserted that workmen are a dirty set and a reckless set. Is this true of American workmen? His observations have been confined to English workmen; would he have occasion to modify the general character of his statement were he to visit and inspect American shops?

Candidly we must say there would be too much in the general want of cleanliness and order in our workshops to justify the assertion. The shops in which cleanliness and order prevail are rather the exception than the rule; and the individual workman who, in the midst of all the carelessness which prevails in this regard, maintains a scrupulous care for personal cleanliness, order in the arrangement of tools, and method in the performance of his work, may be regarded as a rising man.
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