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 worked himself into a permanency that his father’s lawyers found and notified him of the possession of a small income, one hundred dollars per annum of which, they informed him, was to be expended by them upon such books as they thought suitable to his circumstances, upon information provided by the deceased, the remainder to be at his disposal.

Though quite unauthorized to proffer advice, as they honorably stated, they opined that the heir’s wisest course would be to prepare himself at once for college, the income being sufficient to take him through, with care—­and they were, his Very Truly, Cobb & Morse.

Banneker had not the smallest idea of cooping up his mind in a college.  As to future occupation, his father had said nothing that was definite.  His thesis was that observation and thought concerning men and their activities, pointed and directed by intimate touch with what others had observed and set down—­that is, through books—­was the gist of life.  Any job which gave opportunity or leisure for this was good enough.  Livelihood was but a garment, at most; life was the body beneath.  Furthermore, young Banneker would find, so his senior had assured him, that he possessed an open sesame to the minds of the really intelligent wheresoever he might encounter them, in the form of a jewel which he must keep sedulously untarnished and bright.  What was that? asked the boy.  His speech and bearing of a cultivated man.