fearsome, supernatural, creatures, that lived and moved in the unseen
world. Of "hants" and "spirits" and "witches" and "hoodoos" he told the
boy with such earnest confidence and so convincing a manner that to
doubt was impossible. In the unknowable world, the old negro moved
with authority unquestioned, with piety above criticism, with a
religious zeal of such warmth that the boy was often moved by the old
man's wisdom and goodness to go to him with offerings from mother's
pantry.

And then, one day, the boy discovered that this wonderfully wise one
could neither read nor write. Everybody that the boy knew, in the
grown up world, could read and write. The boy himself could even read
"cat" and "rat" and "dog." Vaguely the boy wondered, even then, if the
old black saint's lack of those commonplace accomplishments accounted,
in any way, for his marvelous knowledge of the unseen world.

And father--father--was the greatest, the wisest, and the best man
that ever lived. The boy wondered, sometimes, why the Bible did not
tell about his father. Surely, in all the world, there was no other
man so good as he. And, as for wisdom! There was nothing--nothing--
that father did not know! Always, when other men came to see them,
there was talk of such strange things as "government" and "party"
and "campaigns" and "senators" and "congressmen"--things that the boy
did not in the least know about--but he knew that his father knew,
which was quite enough, indeed, for a boy of his age to know.

The boy, in his Yesterdays, wondered greatly when he heard his father
sometimes wish that he could be a boy again. To him, in the ignorance
of his childhood, such a wish was very strange. Not until the boy had
himself become a man and had learned to rightly value Ignorance did he