Lambert. Jim had become the
head of one of the big manufacturing plants of the South, with a lot of
men working for him. The committee that took him out behind the
schoolhouse to inform him he could not speak at commencement, would now
have to wait in line before a frosted door marked, "Mr. Lambert,
Private." They would have to send up their cards, and the watchdog who
guards the door would tell them, "Cut it short, he's busy!" before they
could break any news to him today.

They hung a picture of Mr. Lambert in the high school at the last
alumni meeting. They hung it on the wall near where the oleander stood
that night.

Dull boy or girl--you with your eyes tear-dimmed sometimes because you
do not seem to learn like some in your classes can you not get a bit of
cheer from the story of Jim?

Hours pass, and still as I sat in that hotel room I was lost in that
school picture and the twenty-one years. There were fifty-four young
people in that picture. They had been shaken these years in the barrel,
and now as I called the roll on them, most of them that I expected to
go up had shaken down and some that I expected to stay down had shaken
up.

Out of that fifty-four, one had gone to a pulpit, one had gone to
Congress and one had gone to the penitentiary. Some had gone to
brilliant success and some had gone down to sad failure. Some had found
happiness and some had found unhappiness. It seemed as tho almost every
note on the keyboard of human possibility had been struck by the one
school of fifty-four.

When that picture was taken the oldest was not more than eighteen, yet
most of them seemed already to have decided their destinies. The
twenty-one years that followed had not changed their courses.

The only changes had come where God had come into a life to uplift it,
or where Mammon had entered to pull it down. And I saw better that the
foolish dreams of success faded before the natural unfolding of
talents, which is the real success. I saw better that "the boy is
father to the man."

The boy who skimmed over his work in school was skimming over his work
as a man. The boy who went to the bottom of things in school was going
to the bottom of things in manhood. Which had helped him to go to the
top of things!

Jim Lambert had merely followed the call of talents unseen in him
twenty-one years before.

The lazy boy became a "tired" man. The industrious boy became an
industrious man. The sporty boy became a spor