o know him
much better in the next few years after mother died than ever before
for we lived together in one room and had few friends. I can see him
now sitting by a small kerosene lamp after I had gone to bed clumsily
trying to mend some rent in my clothes. I thought it an odd occupation
for a man but I know now what he was about. I think his love for my
mother must have been deep for he talked to me a great deal of her and
seemed much more concerned about my future on her account than on
either his own or mine. I think it was she--she was a woman of some
spirit--who persuaded him to consider sending me to college. This
accounted partly for the mending although there was some sentiment
about it too. I think he liked to feel that he was carrying out her
work for me even in such a small matter as this.

How much he was earning and how much he saved I never knew. I went to
school and had all the common things of the ordinary boy and I don't
remember that I ever asked him for any pocket money but what he gave
it to me. It was towards the end of my senior year in the high school
that I began to notice a change in him. He was at times strangely
excited and at other times strangely blue. He asked me a great many
questions about my preference in the matter of a college and bade me
keep well up in my studies. He began to skimp a little and I found out
afterwards that one reason he grew so thin was because he did away
with his noon meal. It makes my blood boil now when I remember where
the fruit of this self-sacrifice went. I wouldn't recall it here
except as a humble tribute to his memory.

One night I came back to the room and though it was not yet dark I was
surprised to see a crack of yellow light creeping out from beneath the
sill. Suspecting something was wrong, I pushed open the door and saw
my father seated by the lamp with a pair of trousers I had worn when a
kid in his hands. His head was bent and he was trying to sew. I went
to his side and asked him what the trouble was. He looked up but he
didn't know me. He never knew me again. He died a few days afterwards.
I found then that he had invested all his savings in a wild-cat mining
scheme. They had been swept away.

So at eighteen I was left alone with the only capital that succeeding
generations of my family ever inherited--a common school education and
a big, sound physique. My father's tragic death was a heavy blow but
the mere fact that I was thrown on my own re