was a blank wall. Only a moment's
hesitation and he would go way down to the bed-rock of mathematics and
come up with a brand new formula of his own devising. Then--"_Voila!
C'est fini!_ let us go for a walk, friend Bob; there is some poetry
that I have remembered--" And we would head out of town, while he
spouted poetry by the yard--and made me like it.

I wish you could see the Paul Straki of those days. I wish I could
show him to you; you would understand so much better the "Paul" of
these later times.

Tall, he seemed, though his eyes were only level with mine, for his
real height was hidden beneath an habitual stoop. It let him conceal,
to some extent, his lameness. He always walked with a noticeable limp,
and here was the cause of the only bitterness that, in those days, was
ever reflected in his face.

"Cossacks!" he explained when he surprised a questioning look upon my
face. "They went through our village. I was two years old--and they
rode me down!"

But the hard coldness went from his eyes, and again they crinkled
about with the kindly, wise lines that seemed so strange in his young
face. "It is only a reminder to me," he added, "that such things are
all in the past; that we are entering a new world where savage
brutality shall no longer rule, and the brotherhood of man will be the
basis upon which men shall build."

And his face, so homely that it was distinctive, had a beauty all its
own when he dared to voice his dreams.

* * * * *

It was this that brought about his expulsion from college. That was in
1935 when the Vornikoff faction brought off their coup d'etat and
secured a strangle hold on Russia. We all remember the campaign of
propaganda that was forced into the very fibre of every country, to
weaken with its insidious dry-rot the safe foundations of our very
civilization. Paul was blinded by his idealism, and he dared to speak.

He was conducting a brilliant research into the structure of the atom;
it ended abruptly with his dismissal. And the accepted theories of
science went unchallenged, while men worked along other lines than
Paul's to attempt the release of the tremendous energy that is latent
in all matter.

I saw him perhaps three times in the four years that followed. He had
a laboratory out in a God-forsaken spot where he carried on his
research. He did enough analytical work to keep him from actual
starvation, though it seemed to me that he was u