so blind that I did not see that the glory lay
on her, and not on me.

* * * * *

Father himself conducted us to school. He would not have delegated
that mission to the President of the United States. He had awaited the
day with impatience equal to mine, and the visions he saw as he
hurried us over the sun-flecked pavements transcended all my dreams.
Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before,
had been his application for naturalization. He had taken the
remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the
earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United
States. It is true that he had left home in search of bread for his
hungry family, but he went blessing the necessity that drove him to
America. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more
than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it
meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of
superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or
religious tyranny. He was only a young man when he landed--thirty-two;
and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was
hungry for his untasted manhood.

Three years passed in sordid struggle and disappointment. He was not
prepared to make a living even in America, where the day laborer eats
wheat instead of rye. Apparently the American flag could not protect
him against the pursuing Nemesis of his limitations; he must expiate
the sins of his fathers who slept across the seas. He had been endowed
at birth with a poor constitution, a nervous, restless temperament,
and an abundance of hindering prejudices. In his boyhood his body was
starved, that his mind might be stuffed with useless learning. In his
youth this dearly gotten learning was sold, and the price was the
bread and salt which he had not been trained to earn for himself.
Under the wedding canopy he was bound for life to a girl whose
features were still strange to him; and he was bidden to multiply
himself, that sacred learning might be perpetuated in his sons, to the
glory of the God of his fathers. All this while he had been led about
as a creature without a will, a chattel, an instrument. In his
maturity he awoke, and found himself poor in health, poor in purse,
poor in useful knowledge, and hampered on all sides. At the first nod
of opportunity he broke away from his prison, and strove to atone for
his w