William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

“This is the Alpha and the Omega, beloved one, of that strange world whose mysteries you deem it to be your duty to penetrate,” said his father, with his secret and beautiful smile.

From that time forward the boy’s evenings were no longer given up to desultory readings in the ancient authors. He bestowed many painful and irksome hours upon the newspaper; and these would have been intolerable had not his labours had the sanction of his father’s patient exposition. Day by day its most obscure mysteries were unfolded to him. Yet the more knowledge he acquired the greater his repugnance became. “I hate it! I hate it!” he cried sometimes, with tears in his eyes.

There was another means also by which his father sought to increase his knowledge of the practical sciences. He would accompany him daily into the streets at all hours of the morning, afternoon and evening. He made him familiar with many labyrinths among the highways and byways of the great city. He gave him an insight into many obscure methods of acquiring pieces of silver. He would denote the character of individual persons as they passed by; and above all, he strove to make the boy familiar with the language that was in daily use about him, and with the plane of ideas of those who used it.

In the course of one of these daily lessons his father pointed out a boy kneeling at the edge of the pavement with a box before him, some brushes and a pot of blacking.

“That boy, beloved one,” said his father, “maintains his place in the scheme by removing the mud from the boots of the passers-by. Observe him now cleansing those of the man in the tall bright hat. For so doing he will be rewarded with a small piece of silver, and with that piece of silver he will obtain food and a roof for his head.”

“I don’t understand, my father, I don’t understand,” said the boy in deep perplexity. “If the man in the tall bright hat gives away to others the pieces of silver he possesses because he is too proud to bear a little mud on his boots, how can he obtain food for himself, and how can he sustain the little room in which he dwells?”

“We will follow in the footsteps of that man,” said his father, “and seek to find out the means by which he gains his own pieces of silver in such profusion.”

For many weeks the boy’s education in the practical sciences was conducted in this fashion; and although at first he lived in a state of deep perplexity, and was often overcome by the feeling that he would never find a key to these bewildering enigmas that made up the life of the great world out of doors, which now for some inscrutable purpose he was called upon to enter, perseverance, study and devout patience furnished him at last with some kind of reward.

Not less than two years of concentrated effort was necessary ere the boy began to make real progress in the least subtle of the astonishing complexities of that potent civilization of the West as evolved in the latter days of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. But as one slight piece of knowledge after another rewarded his intense application, he seemed to derive some ground of certainty from his successes, so that by the time he was nearly eighteen years of age he had pieced together these hard-won fragments of experience in such numbers that they wove themselves into a kind of fabric of lucid ideas. Endowed with this basis upon which to stand, he felt the hour to be at hand when the courage and the capacity would be his to make some sort of an entrance into the life of men and things, in the actual and visible out-of-doors world.

One evening he said to his father with an almost proud air: “To-morrow, my father, I intend to put to the test all this knowledge that has come to me during my many days of study—that is, of course, my father, if you think I speak the language well enough.”