"He was John Thorwald, Jr., only son of John Thorwald, Sr., a Norwegian; his mother was also a Norwegian, but he is a natural born American. Realizing the opportunities for an educated young man in our land, Thorwald's parents determined that he should gain knowledge, and until he was fifteen years old, he attended school in San Francisco. When he was fifteen, his father signed as first mate on the yacht _Zephyr_, going with the oil-king, Henry B. Kingsley, on a pleasure cruise in the Southern Pacific; Thorwald, Sr.'s, story you read in the paper. Soon after the news of the _Zephyr's_ wreck, with all on board lost, as was then supposed, Thorwald's mother died. Her dying words (so young Thorwald told me, and I was moved by his simple, straightforward tale) were an appeal to her boy. She made him promise, for her sake, to study, study, study to gain knowledge, and to rise in the world! Thorwald promised. Then, believing both his parents dead, the young Norwegian, a youth of fifteen without money, had to shift for himself.
"Thomas, Jack London could weave his adventures into a gripping masterpiece. Starting in as cabin-boy on a freighter to Alaska, young Thorwald, in the past ten years, has simply crowded his life with adventure, thrill, and experience, though thrills mean nothing to him. He was in the Klondike gold-fields, in the salmon canneries, a prospector, a lumber-jack in the Canadian Northwest, a cowboy, a sailor, a worker in the Panama Canal Zone, on the Big Ditch, and too many other things to remember. Finally, he drifted to Pittsburgh, where his prodigious strength served him in the steel-mills, and, let me add, served _me_, as I stated.
"And ever, no matter where he wandered, or what was his toil, whenever possible, Thorwald studied. His promise to his mother was always his goal, and in the cities he studied, or in the wilds he read all the books he could find. The past year, finding he had a good-pay job in Pittsburgh, he settled to determined effort, and by sheer resolution, by his wonderful power to grasp facts and ideas for good once he gets them, he made great progress in night school, until he was shifted, a week before he saved my life, to work that required him to toil nightly, alternate weeks. So, for a year, Thor has had every possible advantage, some, unknown to him, I paid for myself; I got him clerical work, with shorter hours, he went to night school, and I employed the very best tutor obtainable, letting Thorwald pay him, as he thought, though his payments wouldn't keep the tutor in neckties. The gratitude of the blond giant is pathetic, and suspecting that I paid the tutor something, he insisted on paying all he could, which I allowed, of course.