years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord,"
saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound
to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of
those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood
found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and
they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering.
Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank
into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.
There were, however, some--such as Josie, Jim, and Ben--to
whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales,
whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school
and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be con-
tent, born without and beyond the World. And their weak
wings beat against their barriers,--barriers of caste, of youth,
of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that
opposed even a whim.


The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the
realization comes that life is leading somewhere,--these were
the years that passed after I left my little school. When they
were past, I came by chance once more to the walls of Fisk
University, to the halls of the chapel of melody. As I lingered
there in the joy and pain of meeting old school-friends, there
swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the
blue hill, and to see the homes and the school of other days,
and to learn how life had gone with my school-children; and I
went.

Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply,