fearful of estranging them in the beginning, of putting between them
and him that very thing he was determined there should not be.

"I have a strange feeling," he said, with a winning little smile,
"that if I were to open my heart to-day, just open it clear up the
way I'd like to if I could, that you boys would look into it, and
then jump back in a scared kind of way and cry, 'Why--that's me!'
You would be a little surprised--wouldn't you?--if you could look
back and see the kind of boy I was, and find I was much the kind of
boy you are?

"Do you know what I think? I think hypocrisy is the worst thing in
the world. I think it's worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the
other bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of
the hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called
self-made men--from the real good men, the men who say 'I haven't
got one bad thing charged up to my account.'

"Now the men out campaigning for me call me a self-made man. Your
superintendent just now spoke of my integrity, of the confidence
reposed in me, and all that. But do you know what is the honest
truth? If I am any kind of a man worth mentioning, if I am deserving
of any honour, any confidence, it is not because I was born with my
heart filled with good and beautiful things, for I was not. It is
because I was born with much in my heart that we call the bad, and
because, after that bad had grown stronger and stronger through the
years it was unchecked, and after it had brought me the great shock,
the great sorrow of my life, I began then, when older than you boys
are now, to see a little of that great truth which you can put
briefly in these words: 'There is good and there is bad in every