20 JUNE 1925, Page 25

TWICE THIRTY

Twice Thirty. By Edward W. Bok. (Charles Scribner's Sonsi 18s.)

Mn. Box dedicates this book to his sons. It is difficult to know quite how to describe it—it might perhaps be called an autobiography in didactic form. The writer depicts his own personality very clearly indeed. We sec him as a very poor office-boy in New York and as a very rich man in Pennsylvania, and lie is always exactly the same person- a man with a delight in living so intense that the hardships of life are nothing but the difficulties which improve the game. His goal is success and his preaching relates to the way there, and the way is by unceasing hard work, work such as an Englishman would hardly think worth while in any cause. The average man in this country if he reads the book (and it is well worth reading) will feel the game not worth the candle, but how well the game is described ! To do the author justice he firmly believes that it should be played within rules ; he is no cynic but a grateful, and, so far as his machine-like energy has permitted his humanity to develop, a human person. The writer is now sixty. As boys he and his brother supported their mother upon 12 dollars 50 a week, " Even in those days when the dollar bought much more than now it was not easy to support a household of three ''. on such a sum.

One would have imagined that forty-eight shillings a week (before the War) would at least have kept the wolf from the door—but the boy was often hungry, and to make a few pence had recourse to miserly and almost revolting expedients. He " used to haunt the lots back of the homes of the wealthy " and literally pick things out of their dustbins to sell ! " Every piece of tinfoil in the street I picked up, and after accumulation I would sell it to the junk-dealer, and a nickel meant a good many sheets of tinfoil ! " A friend, a waiter in the private dining-rooms of the Western Union Telegraph Company, used to give him food after those who paid for it had finished. " Blessed food ! Just try the experience on a cold day of having nothing to eat since six o'clock in the morning, run errands for nine hours, be an active boy with a boy's stomach as large as all the world, and then wait until three o'clock and see how a slice of roast beef tastes I It is unbelievable ! Never has food tasted since or ever will as did these lunches left behind by the well-fed officers of that great corporation ! " Now, he tells us, he is giving employment to the grandsons of those directors, the crumbs from whose table meant so much to him