You do not even recognize the name. But, if I were to say instead the one word, "Paul"--ah, now I can see some of you start abruptly in sudden, wide-eyed attention, while the breath catches in your throats and the memory of a strange dread clutches your hearts. 'Straki,' we called him at college. He was never "Paul," except to me alone; there was never the easy familiarity between him and the crowd at large, whose members were "Bill" and "Dick" and other nicknames unprintable. But "Straki" he accepted. "_Bien, mon cher ami_," he told me--he was as apt to drop into French as Russian or any of a dozen other languages--"a name--what is it? A label by which we distinguish one package of goods from a thousand others just like it! I am unlike: for me one name is as good as another. It is what is here that counts,"--he tapped his broad forehead that rose high to the tangle of black hair--"and here,"--and this time he placed one hand above his heart. "It is for what I give to the world of my head and my heart that I must be remembered. And, if I give nothing--then the name, it is less than nothing." * * * * * Dreamer--poet--scientist--there were many Paul Strakis in that one man. Brilliant in his work--he was majoring in chemistry--he was a mathematician who was never stopped. I've seen him pause, puzzled by some phase of a problem that, to me, was a blank wall. Only a moment's hesitation and he would go way down to the bed-rock of mathematics and come up with a brand new formula of his own devising. Then--"_Voila! C'est fini!_ let us go for a walk, friend Bob; there is some poetry that I have remembered--" And we would head out of town, while he spouted poetry by the yard--and made me like it. I wish you could see the Paul Straki of those days. I wish I could show him to you; you would understand so much better the "Paul" of these later times. Tall, he seemed, though his eyes were only level with mine, for his real height was hidden beneath an habitual stoop. It let him conceal, to some extent, his lameness. He always walked with a noticeable limp, and here was the cause of the only bitterness that, in those days, was ever reflected in his face. "Cossacks!" he explained when he surprised a questioning look upon my face. "They went through our village. I was two years old--and they rode me down!" But the hard coldness went from his eyes, and again they crinkled about with the kindly, wise lines that seemed so strange in his young face. "It is only a reminder to me," he added, "that such things are all in the past; that we are entering a new world where savage brutality shall no longer rule, and the brotherhood of man will be the basis upon which men shall build." And his face, so homely that it was distinctive, had a beauty all its own when he dared to voice his dreams. * * * * *