He ran to the coachman, asked the address, and presented himself at the
door of the ancestral Ledyards, hope beating high. The relationship
was to be the key to open all doors. And the door of the ancestral
Ledyards was shut in his face. The father was out. The son put no
stock in the story of the ragged stranger. He did not even know that
Ledyards existed in America. What was to hinder any common tramp
trumping up such a story? Where were the tattered fellow's proofs?
Ledyard came away with just enough wholesome human rage to keep him
from sinking to despair, or to what is more unmanning, self-pity. He
had failed before, through trying to frame his life to other men's
plans. He had failed now, through trying to win success through other
men's efforts--a barnacle clinging to the hull of some craft freighted
with fortune. Perhaps, too, he fairly and squarely faced the fact that
if he was to be one whit different from the beggar for whom he had been
mistaken, he must build his own life solely and wholly on his own
efforts.
On he wandered, the roar of the great city's activities rolling past
him in a tide.
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