“You don’t know,” said his father.

Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him.

“No. I haven’t any anaesthetic,” his father said.

Nick watched his father’s hands scrubbing each other with the soap.

Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.

She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty.

Nick’s father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin.

Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him⁠—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office.

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.