atory table one day
and promptly broke out on them in his forcible manner.

"What do you mean," he said, "by talking about Hoover's luck? He has not
had luck; he has had reward. If you would work half as hard and half as
intelligently as he does you would have half his luck. If I tell any one
of you to go and do a thing for me I have to come around in half an hour
to see if you have done it. But I can tell Hoover to do a thing, and
never think of it again. I know it will be done. And he doesn't ask me
how to do it, either. If I told him to start to Kamchatka tomorrow to
bring me back a walrus tooth, I'd never hear of it again until he came
back with the tooth. And then I'd ask him how he had done it."

Dr. Branner was as kind to his boys as he was stern when sternness was
needed. Hoover came down with typhoid in his Junior year, just at a time
when his finances could not afford such an expensive luxury. So Dr.
Branner sent him to a hospital and saw that he was cared for by the best
of physicians and nurses and told him to forget about paying for it all
until after he had graduated. And that probably meant that the good
professor had to go for some time without buying books, which was what
he usually did with his extra money.

Another unfortunate illness was announced to the busy student by an
outbreak of little red spots on his body which were declared by the
college physician to be the result of poison oak. But they were not;
they meant measles, and measles needs prompt attention. Unfortunately
young Hoover's neglected case affected his eyes to such an extent that
for several years afterward he had to wear glasses. And out of this grew
the familiar Stanford tradition that Herbert Hoover ruined his eyes
while in college by over-much night work on his studies!

As a matter of fact Hoover was no college grind. He studied hard enough
at what he liked or thought important for his fitting to be a mining
engineer, but he did not dodge getting a few credits from well-known
"snap" courses, and he got through other required, but, to his mind,
superfluous ones without doing much more work on them than necessary. He
had a disconcerting habit of starting in on a course and then if he
found it uninteresting or unpromising as a contributor to the special
education he was interested in, of simply dropping out of the class
without consultation or permission. But he did dig hard into what he
thought really counted; his record in the