His father was a leading man in his city; one who, by his native ability and the dynamic force that seems to be a characteristic of the race, had risen from poverty to the position of chief merchant and capitalist of the town in which he lived. He had been elected mayor in a time of stress; but his popularity among the citizens generally had cost him, as I learned later, something among his own people. The breadth of his views had not been approved by them. The abilities that in the father had taken this direction of the mingling of the practical and the theoretical had, in the son, taken the form I have stated. He was an idealist: a poet and a dreamer. The boy from the first had discovered powers that had given his father the keenest delight, not unmingled with a little misgiving. As he grew up among the best class of boys in his town, and became conscious that he was not one of them, his inquiring and aspiring mind began early to seek the reasons for the difference. Why should he be held a little apart from them? He was a Jew. Yes, but why should a Jew be held apart? They talked about their families. Why, his family could trace back for two thousand and more years to princes and kings. They had a different religion. But he saw other boys with different religions going and playing together. They were Christians, and believed in Christ, while the Jew, etc. This puzzled him till he found that some of them--a few--did not hold the same views of Christ with the others. Then he began to study for himself, boy as he was, the history of Christ, and out of it came questions that his father could not answer and was angry that he should put to him. He went to a young Rabbi who told him that Christ was a good man, but mistaken in His claims. So, the boy drifted a little apart from his own people, and more and more he studied the questions that arose in his mind, and more and more he suffered; but more and more he grew strong. The father, too proud of his son's independence to coerce him by an order which might have been a law to him, had, nevertheless, thrown him on his own resources and cut him down to the lowest figure on which he could live, confident that his own opinions would be justified and his son return home.