their brains and
can't hook up a single original idea of any kind? Why, I've met
hundreds of them, Davy. Now that night Harassan would have hurled at
you a lot of pompous commonplaces, and you would have hailed him as a
great and wise man. I broke from the beaten path. I told you plain
truth. Was I ever asked to lecture again? People won't pay to hear
plain truth, Davy. I suspect that I should have done better had I not
been trying all my life to drive plain truth into unwilling ears."

"I suspect so, too," said I mildly.

He laughed at my ready acquiescence. "I started wrong at home," he
went on. "Had I listened to Rufus and plodded along in his humdrum
way, I suppose I'd be rich now. But I couldn't. After I left the
valley I went to Kansas and really settled down, got a school to teach,
and for a time I was quite in the way of becoming a successful
educator--principal of a high-school, perhaps. I might even have
become president of a college, but to die the head of a fresh-water
college did not seem a very glorious end; nor did teaching a lot of
foolish young men to live what are held successful lives seem very
inspiring living. So I went on west to San Francisco and tried
newspaper work. It seemed just the vocation for me. Here I could use
my sword against the dragons of untruth and corruption. The beast
stalks forth brazenly enough, and without considering the moral side at
all, it is sport to attack him. To get myself into a position to
attack him, I had to serve an apprenticeship. You know what that
means--the daily digging for ephemeral facts. But I stuck to it. I
saw the day when I should be the most feared man on the coast, wielding
a pen as efficacious as a surgeon's knife. Unfortunately, my knife
first struck a politician named Mulligan, who owned some stock in the
paper. You know the result. I could direct my caustic pen against
O'Connor or Einstein, but from Mulligan came my living. I took to the
sea to breathe purer air, sailing as supercargo on a trading vessel.
For two years I knocked about the South Sea Islands and along the coast
of Asia, and it seemed that I was gathering a vast amount of
information which would be of service to the race if preserved in a
book. How I worked over that book! When I got back to San Francisco I
saw my fame and fortune about to be made by it. At last the power to
do something worth while was in my reach."

The Professor paused. He spread wid