The American: A Middle Western Legend Read Online Free PDF

expression used about him many times, not bright. A sense of himself returned; here was not the struggle of an army in the field; they looked at him, and again he realized fully his ugliness, his harelip, robbing himself of any assurance he might have had. Even the two boys he lived with didn’t trust him; they would talk in whispers, apart from him, and sometimes they would stare at him as if they had never seen him before. He had to hack his way through the basic mysteries of multiplication, subtraction, division, and if he dared to ask a question, he would find the whole class laughing at him. The teacher asked him once:
    â€œAre you sure this is the place for you, John?”
    Inwardly, he cursed and fumed at the sleepy, smug Ohio town. “Get out again,” he told himself. There was something wrong, something woefully wrong about the inside and the outside of himself; he put it to himself that way. Inside him, nothing was impossible; he was sure few people dreamed his dreams; inside, he was glib, assured; he made speeches mentally and talked fluently and intelligently. He read a story about Thomas Jefferson and thereafter devoured everything that he could lay hands on which in any way concerned the man, but when he tried to translate his wonderful discovery of democracy into speech in the classroom, the words came forth distorted and wrongly accented, and his thoughts crumpled in a maze of laughter.
    And with that, he had to keep himself alive. He had to earn at least three dollars a week. He loaded carts, ran errands, cleaned outhouses, forced himself awake in the middle of the night to help clean out the tannery. But that made for only a few pennies here and there. “Bad times,” they told him, and paid him five cents for an hour’s work. Once, when he hadn’t eaten for three days, his mother came in from the farm with a basket of food, and though he ate it and would eat it again, he resented her, offered her no word of thanks.
    He came to understand what he wanted. He wanted to be a teacher. He wanted to stop being a work-beast and live in that other life he saw all around him, where people wore decent clothes and ate enough and seemed so happy, where small children had more learning than he did. A teacher was paid over twenty dollars a month, and a teacher didn’t have to work the way he did. A teacher walked down the street and he had the respect of the community. Well, it was better to know what he wanted to do; the weariness had a purpose, and there was a certain insanity now in his driving toward an end. In a fashion, he became happier than he had ever been; he was creating for himself a code and a philosophy of opportunity and advancement by hard work. He would show them that he could work harder than the next man.
    A year passed, and he was still alive; he had lost some weight and been sick twice, but he was alive, and he had schooling. He walked to Lexington and called on a Mr. Gailey, who ran a school for the instruction of the teaching profession. He was not a desirable contact for Mr. Gailey; he was not well dressed; but he talked for three hours about why he must be a teacher, why Mr. Gailey must give him a chance, and how he would pay back every penny of it afterward, even if it took him all his life. He sat crouched over, talking and pleading and even threatening, a fire in his eyes that suggested to the instructor that this farm boy was not quite sane; but there was a real need for teachers, and an even greater need for some who could speak both German and English. Gailey agreed to give him a chance.

XIII
    So there are no gates closed to a man with talent; he had always known what was inside of him, and at nineteen he was a teacher at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month. The people round and about said, “You wouldn’t have thought it about Altgeld’s boy, but it just goes to show that you can’t judge a man by how he looks.” He bought a black