might all have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the
Southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care.
This was the boy's impression of what slavery caused, and, for
him, was all it taught. Coming down in the early morning from his
bedroom in his grandmother's house -- still called the Adams
Building in -- F Street and venturing outside into the air
reeking with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found
himself on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks
meandering from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the
white marble columns and fronts of the Post Office and Patent
Office which faced each other in the distance, like white Greek
temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city.
Here and there low wooden houses were scattered along the
streets, as in other Southern villages, but he was chiefly
attracted by an unfinished square marble shaft, half-a-mile
below, and he walked down to inspect it before breakfast. His
aunt drily remarked that, at this rate, he would soon get through
all the sights; but she could not guess -- having lived always in
Washington -- how little the sights of Washington had to do with
its interest.

The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an
understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he
understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a
horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only
more repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free
soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken,
ignorant, vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and
yet the picture had another side. The May sunshine and shadow had
something to do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy