e years ago, my son. I have given
you the best schooling a boy can have, and you have not shown the least
appreciation of your advantages. I do not enjoy saying this, Hugh,
but in spite of all my efforts and of those of your mother, you have
remained undeveloped and irresponsible. My hope, as you know, was to
have made you a professional man, a lawyer, and to take you into my
office. My father and grandfather were professional men before me. But
you are wholly lacking in ambition."

And I had burned with it all my life!

"I have ambition," I cried, the tears forcing themselves to my eyes.

"Ambition--for what, my son?"

I hesitated. How could I tell him that my longings to do something,
to be somebody in the world were never more keen than at that moment?
Matthew Arnold had not then written his definition of God as the stream
of tendency by which we fulfil the laws of our being; and my father,
at any rate, would not have acquiesced in the definition. Dimly but
passionately I felt then, as I had always felt, that I had a mission to
perform, a service to do which ultimately would be revealed to me. But
the hopelessness of explaining this took on, now, the proportions of a
tragedy. And I could only gaze at him.

"What kind of ambition, Hugh?" he repeated sadly.

"I--I have sometimes thought I could write, sir, if I had a chance. I
like it better than anything else. I--I have tried it. And if I could
only go to college--"

"Literature!" There was in his voice a scandalized note.

"Why not, father?" I asked weakly.

And now it was he who, for the first time, seemed to be at a loss to
express himself. He turned in his chair, and with a sweep of the hand
indicated the long rows of musty-backed volumes. "Here," he said, "you
have had at your disposal as well-assorted a small library as the city
contains, and you have not availed yourself of it. Yet you talk to me
of literature as a profession. I am afraid, Hugh, that this is merely
another indication of your desire to shun hard work, and I must tell
you frankly that I fail to see in you the least qualification for such
a career. You have not even inherited my taste for books. I venture
to say, for instance, that you have never even read a paragraph of
Plutarch, and yet when I was your age I was completely familiar with the
Lives. You will not read Scott or Dickens."

The impeachment was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to
me. Naturally I was afraid to