Their life was spent frugally in cities where they haunted libraries,
or, sumptuously, upon the open road where a modest supply of ready cash
goes a long way. Young Banneker's education, after the routine
foundation, was curiously heterodox, but he came through it with his
intellectual digestion unimpaired and his mental appetite avid. By
example he had the competent self-respect and unmistakable bearing of a
gentleman, and by careful precept the speech of a liberally educated
man. When he was seventeen, his father died of a twenty-four hours'
pneumonia, leaving the son not so much stricken as bewildered, for their
relations had been comradely rather than affectionate. For a time it was
a question whether the youngster, drifting from casual job to casual
job, would not degenerate into a veritable hobo, for he had drunk deep
of the charm of the untrammeled and limitless road. Want touched him,
but lightly; for he was naturally frugal and hardy. He got a railroad
job by good luck, and it was not until he had worked himself into a
permanency that his father's lawyers found and notified him of the
possession of a small income, one hundred dollars per annum of which,
they informed him, was to be expended by them upon such books as they
thought suitable to his circumstances, upon information provided by the
deceased, the remainder to be at his disposal.
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