“As you haven’t seen Boston in late years,” Colonel Craighill was saying, “you will find much to interest you while we are there for the municipal conferences. Though I haven’t the slightest ancestral claim on New England I feel a certain kinship with her people. If we were not so firmly planted here I should like to move to Boston to spend my last years there. Contact with some of her fine, public-spirited citizens would be an inspiration. Some of my best friends are Bostonians, friends I have made through my connection with public work. People ask me--and they will be asking you from time to time--why I spend so much time on these movements for the public welfare; but they have been a great resource to me. I have been well repaid for all I have done. I have had my perplexities and worries, a modern business man is ground in a hard mill; but I am conscious of having done my little toward bettering our political and social conditions, and nothing in my life makes me happier than that thought. Do you know,” and he smiled depreciatingly, “I heard from one or two quarters that Harvard was going to confer a degree on me next year for my work in behalf of civic reform; it was only an intimation, but one of my friends, whom I have learned to know well at our annual conferences, is a prominent alumnus, and he has remarked several times that they’d have to make a Harvard man of me somehow.” “I think it is so remarkable,” said Mrs. Craighill, “that you never went to college. You seem like a college man.” “I have regretted more than I can tell you my lack of systematic education. My father was hardly more than well-to-do and I went into business at eighteen. But I have been a diligent reader; you might say that I have always been a student. It’s possible that I should have fared poorly in college; my disposition was always, even when a boy, to brush away details and seek the broader view. I think I owe my success in life to that--the ability to climb upon the hills and see the lights afar off.” He stirred his coffee with the care we give in our ease to unimportant things. He was satisfied with himself and the world; when he spoke she felt as though she were eavesdropping upon a reverie. “It is a great joy to have you here by my side--the house has brightened since you came. If only Wayne would take the place to which he was born in the community I should not have a care!” “But Wayne is doing well; I thought you said yourself that he was attending very regularly at the office, that he had really begun to take an interest in business.”