the harbor. For Joe had been
"up against it" hard. Though blunt and frank about most things he talked
little about himself, but I got his story bit by bit. "Graft" had come
into it at the start. In a town of the Middle West his father had been a
physician with a good practice, until when Joe was eleven years old a
case of smallpox was discovered. Joe's father vaccinated about a score
of children that week. The "dope" he used was mailed to him by a drug
firm in Chicago. It was "rotten." Over half the children were
desperately ill and seven of them died. Joe's father, his mother and
both older sisters did duty as nurses day and night. After that they
left town, moved from town to town, that story always following, and
finally both parents died. Since then Joe had been a teamster, a clerk
in a hardware store, a brakeman, a telegrapher, and last, the assistant
editor of a paper in a small town. He had scraped and slaved and studied
throughout with the idea of coming East to college. He had come at
twenty-two, beating his way on freight trains. On the top of a car one
night he had fallen asleep and been knocked on the head by a steel beam
jutting down under a bridge. Then, after two weeks on a hospital bed, he
had arrived at college.

Here he had earned a meager way by writing football and baseball news
for a string of western papers. Here he had looked for an education, and
here "a bunch of dead ones" had handed him "news from the graveyard"
instead.

I can still see him in classroom, head cocked to one side, grimly
watching the prof. And once during a Bible course lecture I heard his
voice blandly ironic behind me:

"Will somebody ask Mister Charley Darwin to be so good as to step this
way?"

"We've been cheated, Bill," he told me. "We've been cheated right along.
Take history, for instance, the kind of stuff we were handed in school.
I got onto it first when I was fourteen. It was a rainy Saturday and my
mother told me to go and clean out an old closet up in the attic. Well,
I found my German grandfather's diary there, written when he was in
college in Leipsic, in 1848. The way those kids jumped into things! The
way they got themselves mixed up in the Revolution of Forty Eight! To
hear my young grandfather talk, that year was one of the biggest times
in European history. Our school history gave it five pages and then
druled on about courts and kings. 'I'll go to college,' I made up my
mind. 'College will put me next