“Yes,” he said, quietly, tenderly, “you will inspire me. When I get up before those men tonight I'm going to see the picture of that boy straining for his first glimpse of New York Harbour. I'm going to think for just a minute of the things that boy brought with him--things he has never lost. And then I'll see you as you stand here now---it will be enough. What I need to do is to get mad. If I falter I'll just think of some of those times when you came home from your campaigns--how you looked--what you said. It will bring the inspiration. Father, I figure it out like this. We're going to get it back. We're going to get what's coming to us. There's another America than the America of you dreamers. To yours you have given; from mine I will get. And the irony of it--don't think I don't see the irony of it--is that I will be called the real American. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make the railroads of this State--oh, it sounds like schoolboy talk, but just give me a little time--I'm going to make the railroads of this State pay off every cent of that mortgage on your farm! Father,” he finished, impetuously, in a last appeal, “you're broken up now, disappointed, but would you honestly want me to travel the road you've traveled?” “My boy,” answered the old man, and the tears came with it, “I wanted you to travel the road of an honest man.” Herman Beckman did not go to the commencement exercises that night. There was no train home until morning, so he had the night to spend in town. He was alone, for his friends assumed that he would be out at the university. But he preferred being alone. He sat in his room at the hotel, reading. And he could read. Years of discipline stood him in good stead now. His life had taught him to read anywhere, at any time. He had never permitted himself the luxury of not being “in the mood.” It was only the men who had gone to college who could do that. He _had_ to read. He always carried some little book with him, for how did a man know that he might not have to wait an hour for a train somewhere? The man had a simple-minded veneration for knowledge. He wanted to know about things. And he had never learned to pretend that he didn't want to know. He quite lacked the modern art of flippancy. He believed in great books. And so on the night that his son was being graduated from college he sat in his room at the hotel--cheap room in a mediocre hotel; he had never learned to feel at home in the rich ones--reading Marcus Aurelius. But his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man. At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought of his son's oration. They wanted a statement from him. He told them that he had never believed the sins of a parent should be visited on a child, and that it was even so with the thought. He had always contended that a man should do his own thinking. The contention applied to his son.