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