He went on alone to Petersburg. And then real disaster struck. Both his baggage and the money he had counted on for his return home were stolen. He found himself absolutely penniless and half starved in a strange, unfriendly city. Fortunately for Ignace, not everyone in it was unfriendly. A poor plumber took the boy in off the street to save him from freezing to death. With nothing to do all day but try to stay warm, Ignace had plenty of time to think over his foolishness. He had no idea what to do next. On one point, however, he was adamant. He would not write his father again. “How can I?” he said to the friendly plumber. “He already sent me more than he could afford. And I lost it! I can’t ask him for more!” A few days later the janitor of the building came to the plumber’s little basement room and said, “Isn’t your name Paderewski? There’s a letter for you at the General Delivery window of the Post Office.” “For me? But that’s impossible. From whom?” “From a Jan Paderewski. The Post Office has been asking for you all over town. Just by chance I heard about it.” The letter from home enclosed a hundred rubles. Ignace left Petersburg the next day and was soon safe at home in Sudylkow, thinner but considerably wiser than he had been a year before. One question had haunted him all the way home. “How did you know where to find me?” he asked his father. “And how did you know how desperately I needed that money?” “Oh, that was easy,” Mr. Paderewski said. “You see, I had a dream. I saw you hungry and cold in St. Petersburg, so I sent the letter to the Post Office there and begged them to look for you. The surprising thing is that they found you.” The fact that his father’s intense love for him had worked a small miracle on his behalf touched the boy’s heart so deeply that he made an immediate resolution. He would repay his father’s goodness by doing exactly as his father wanted. He would go back to the Conservatory and finish his studies with no more nonsense. Nor would he put his father to any more years of expense than the good man had originally expected. He was now two years behind his own classmates, but he vowed that somehow he would graduate with them. This gave him six months in which to complete the regular work of two years! During these months of intensive study, young Ignace began to develop the gift that would carry him through so many crises in his life: an enormous power of concentration. On graduation day Mr. Paderewski was in the hall, sick at heart because he did not really believe that his son could possibly have passed the rigorous final examinations for the music diploma. As the list of the names was read, as one boy after another went up to the platform, the nervous father braced himself. “But of course his name will not be called. How could it be? The others in the class have been working an extra year and a half ... There ... that’s the last boy going up now, I think.”