t the clear, blue
eyes, that told of a far cleaner life than is lived by one in a thousand
of those that hold the frontiers of civilization; when I caught an
expression about the mouth that told of an innate humanity far beyond
the power of worldly losses or misfortunes to crush and subdue, I could
not keep from my lips the words that gave substance to my thought; and
the thought was this: that it were far better if we who were supposed to
be competent to the task of education should sit reverently at the feet
of this man, than that we should presume to instruct him. For knowledge
may come from books, and even youth may possess it, but wisdom comes
only from experience, and this man had that wisdom in far greater
measure than we of books and laboratories and classrooms could ever hope
to have it. He had lived years while we were living days.

I thought of a learned scholar who, through patient labor in amassing
facts, had demonstrated the influence of the frontier in the development
of our national ideals; who had pointed out how, at each successive
stage of American history, the heroes of the frontier, pushing farther
and farther into the wilderness, conquering first the low coastal plain
of the Atlantic seaboard, then the forested foothills and ridges of the
Appalachians, had finally penetrated into the Mississippi Valley, and,
subduing that, had followed on westward to the prairies, and then to the
great plains, and then clear across the great divide, the alkali
deserts, and the Sierras, to California and the Pacific Coast; how these
frontiersmen, at every stage of our history, had sent back wave after
wave of strength and virility to keep alive the sturdy ideals of toil
and effort and independence,--ideals that would counteract the mellowing
and softening and degenerating influences of the hothouse civilization
that grew up so rapidly in the successive regions that they left behind.
Turner's theory that most of what is typical and unique in American
institutions and ideals owes its existence to the backset of the
frontier life found a living exemplar in the man who stood before me on
that May morning.

But he would not be discouraged from his purpose. He had made up his
mind to complete the course that the school offered; to take up the
thread of his education at the point where he had dropped it more than
forty years before. He had made up his mind, and it was easy to see that
he was not a man to be deterred from