lost nothing of what was to be learned through reading, through
attendance at public meetings, through exercising the rights of
citizenship. Even here he was hindered by a natural inability to acquire
the English language. In time, indeed, he learned to read, to follow a
conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly, and
his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be
worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw
one step nearer to them. He could send his children to school, to learn
all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common
school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even
college! His children should be students, should fill his house with
books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the
Elysian Fields of liberal learning. As for the children themselves, he
knew no surer way to their advancement and happiness.

So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that my father led us
to school on that first day. He took long strides in his eagerness, the
rest of us running and hopping to keep up.

At last the four of us stood around the teacher's desk; and my father,
in his impossible English, gave us over in her charge, with some broken
word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no longer
contain. I venture to say that Miss Nixon was struck by something
uncommon in the group we made, something outside of Semitic features and
the abashed manner of the alien. My little sister was as pretty as a
doll, with her clear pink-and-white face, short golden curls, and eyes
like blue violets when you caught them looking up. My brother might have
been a girl, too, with his cherubic contours of face, rich red color,