in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking
boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day,
as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across
me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England,
where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something
put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-
cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange
was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,
--refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned
upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from
the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but
shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region
of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was
bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or
beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.
Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for
the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities,
were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes,
I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would
do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the
sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,
--some way. With other black boys the strife was not so
fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy,
or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking
distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry,
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own
house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us