to the music of the hideous snoring of the honest bread-winners until two and three o’clock in the morning, then got up and took refuge on the roof, where he sometimes got a nap and sometimes failed entirely.  His appetite was leaving him and the zest of life was going along with it.  Finally, owe day, being near the imminent verge of total discouragement, he said to himself—­and took occasion to blush privately when he said it, “If my father knew what my American name is,—­he—­well, my duty to my father rather requires that I furnish him my name.  I have no right to make his days and nights unhappy, I can do enough unhappiness for the family all by myself.  Really he ought to know what my American name is.”  He thought over it a while and framed a cablegram in his mind to this effect: 

“My American name is Howard Tracy.”

That wouldn’t be suggesting anything.  His father could understand that as he chose, and doubtless he would understand it as it was meant, as a dutiful and affectionate desire on the part of a son to make his old father happy for a moment.  Continuing his train of thought, Tracy said to himself, “Ah, but if he should cable me to come home!  I—­I—­couldn’t do that—­I mustn’t do that.  I’ve started out on a mission, and I mustn’t turn my back on it in cowardice.  No, no, I couldn’t go home, at—­at—­ least I shouldn’t want to go home.”  After a reflective pause:  “Well, maybe—­perhaps—­it would be my duty to go in the circumstances; he’s very old and he does need me by him to stay his footsteps down the long hill that inclines westward toward the sunset of his life.  Well, I’ll think about that.  Yes, of course it wouldn’t be right to stay here.  If I—­ well, perhaps I could just drop him a line and put it off a little while and satisfy him in that way.  It would be—­well, it would mar everything to have him require me to come instantly.”  Another reflective pause—­ then:  “And yet if he should do that I don’t know but—­oh, dear me—­home! how good it sounds! and a body is excusable for wanting to see his home again, now and then, anyway.”

He went to one of the telegraph offices in the avenue and got the first end of what Barrow called the “usual Washington courtesy,” where “they treat you as a tramp until they find out you’re a congressman, and then they slobber all over you.”  There was a boy of seventeen on duty there, tying his shoe.  He had his foot on a chair and his back turned towards the wicket.  He glanced over his shoulder, took Tracy’s measure, turned back, and went on tying his shoe.  Tracy finished writing his telegram and waited, still waited, and still waited, for that performance to finish, but there didn’t seem to be any finish to it; so finally Tracy said: 

“Can’t you take my telegram?”

The youth looked over his shoulder and said, by his manner, not his words: 

“Don’t you think you could wait a minute, if you tried?”