entertainment. A more than sufficient number of people with musical
and elocutionary talent volunteered their services to make a program.
Among these was my brown-eyed violinist. But our relations were not
the same as they were when we had played our first duet together. A
year or so after that time she had dealt me a crushing blow by getting
married. I was partially avenged, however, by the fact that, though
she was growing more beautiful, she was losing her ability to play the
violin.

I was down on the program for one number. My selection might have
appeared at that particular time as a bit of affectation, but I
considered it deeply appropriate; I played Beethoven's "Sonata
Pathétique." When I sat down at the piano and glanced into the faces
of the several hundreds of people who were there solely on account of
love or sympathy for me, emotions swelled in my heart which enabled me
to play the "Pathétique" as I could never again play it. When the
last tone died away, the few who began to applaud were hushed by the
silence of the others; and for once I played without receiving an
encore.

The benefit yielded me a little more than two hundred dollars, thus
raising my cash capital to about four hundred dollars. I still held
to my determination of going to college; so it was now a question of
trying to squeeze through a year at Harvard or going to Atlanta, where
the money I had would pay my actual expenses for at least two years.
The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and
my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about
the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my
boyhood and boarded a train for the South.