g," she objected.

"I think you a sort of friend of a day, who is going away very soon
leaving pleasant memories," he answered, smiling. "A butterfly visit.
I'm not much given to talking, but if you'd like it--"

"Of course I should like it."

So he sketched for her his history. His mother he barely remembered;
"dark, and quite beautiful, I believe, though that might be only a
child's vision; my father rarely spoke of her, but I think all the
emotional side of his life was buried with her." The father, an American
of Danish ancestry, had been ousted from the chair of Sociology in old,
conservative Havenden College, as the logical result of his writings
which, because they shrewdly and clearly pointed out certain ulcerous
spots in the economic and social system, were denounced as "radical" by
a Board of Trustees honestly devoted to Business Ideals. Having a small
income of his own, the ex-Professor decided upon a life of investigatory
vagrancy, with special reference to studies, at first hand, of the
voluntarily unemployed. Not knowing what else to do with the only child
of his marriage, he took the boy along. Contemptuous of, rather than
embittered against, an academic system which had dispensed with his
services because it was afraid of the light--"When you cast a light,
they see only the resultant shadows," was one of his sayings which had
remained with Banneker--he had resolved to educate the child himself.

Their life was spent frugally in cities where they haunted libraries,
or, sumptuously, upon the open road where a modest supply of ready cash
goes a long way. Young Banneker's education, after the routine
foundation, was curiously heterodox, but he came through it with his
intellectual digestion unimpaired and his mental appetite avid. By
example he had the competent self-respect and unmistakable bearing of a
gentleman, and by careful precept the speech of a liberally educated
man. When he was seventeen, his father died of a twenty-four hours'
pneumonia, leaving the son not so much stricken as bewildered, for their
relations had been comradely rather than affectionate. For a time it was
a question whether the youngster, drifting from casual job to casual
job, would not degenerate into a veritable hobo, for he had drunk deep
of the charm of the untrammeled and limitless road. Want touched him,
but lightly; for he was naturally frugal and hardy. He got a railroad
job by good luck, and it was not until he had wor