ter
that sat through the evening meal with no mention of the things in his
heart. It was his father who first broached the subject and he broached
it bluntly while the family sat about him, in the spirit of the
primitive family council.

"Ham," he said slowly, "I've been sittin' here all day turnin' your
notions over in my mind. You want to go away from here and to abandon
this place where you was born; where your mother and me started
housekeepin'; where we've lived for twenty years. If we decided to do
that--an' it wouldn't be no easy thing for either your mother or
me--what plans would you aim to carry out?"

The boy shook his head. He did not shake it in the abashed fashion of
one confronted with a question for which he has no answer, but with the
frank manner of one brushing aside a trivial and irrelevant question.

"I don't know yet. First I've got to have an education, then I'll decide
what I'm going to do, and when I decide I'll succeed."

The father's brows knitted themselves gravely and with displeasure.
"Then, after all your talk and bragging, you haven't got no definite
plan. All you argue for is cutting loose from the roof over us an'
livin' up our little savin's."

"I know that I can give you big things in the place of little things."
The lad's voice again mounted and into his face came the flush of
assured inspiration. "The thing that tells me is something you wouldn't
understand. I can't any more put it into words for you than I can tell
you why the moon swings the tides, but it's just as dead sure as that
an' I can feel it here." He clapped his hands over his heart and went on
with quiet certainty: "I don't know no name to call it by except a
feelin' of power. There's only one thing in God's whole world that can
stop me, an' that's ignorance and lonesomeness. You call it all
dreamin'--well, give me a chance and I'll make it all so real that you
can't have any more doubts."

"I thought," said Tom Burton a bit wearily, "that maybe you might have
some sensible argument, but all you've got is moonshine. I've been
settin' here figurin' all day so that, if you could convince me, I'd
know where I stood with the bank, but it don't hardly seem worth talkin'
about."

"I can't make you understand," declared the boy unwaveringly, "because
you're thinkin' in hundreds where I'm thinkin' in millions. You ask me
about details. All I know is that I've got a destiny to be as great as
any man can be an' that succ