asted youth by a life of useful labor; while at the same time he
sought to lighten the gloom of his narrow scholarship by freely
partaking of modern ideas. But his utmost endeavor still left him far
from his goal. In business, nothing prospered with him. Some fault of
hand or mind or temperament led him to failure where other men found
success. Wherever the blame for his disabilities be placed, he reaped
their bitter fruit. "Give me bread!" he cried to America. "What will
you do to earn it?" the challenge came back. And he found that he was
master of no art, of no trade; that even his precious learning was of
no avail, because he had only the most antiquated methods of
communicating it.

So in his primary quest he had failed. There was left him the
compensation of intellectual freedom. That he sought to realize in
every possible way. He had very little opportunity to prosecute his
education, which, in truth, had never been begun. His struggle for a
bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening
school; but he lost nothing of what was to be learned through reading,
through attendance at public meetings, through exercising the rights
of citizenship. Even here he was hindered by a natural inability to
acquire the English language. In time, indeed, he learned to read, to
follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write
correctly, and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this
day.

If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be
worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw
one step nearer to them. He could send his children to school, to
learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The
common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps
even college! His children should be students, should fill his house
with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy
in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. As for the children
themselves, he knew no surer way to their advancement and happiness.

So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that my father led us
to school on that first day. He took long strides in his eagerness,
the rest of us running and hopping to keep up.

At last the four of us stood around the teacher's desk; and my father,
in his impossible English, gave us over in her charge, with some
broken word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no
longer contain. I