to verify.

When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or political
either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction and
resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of
literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.

Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted, I
became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the press--now
and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirty
years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did
this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions
of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything that
might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent,
or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a
free nigger and not a slave nigger."



II


Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political battlefield
my earlier years were most seriously influenced by the religious spirit
of the times. We passed to and fro between Washington and the two family
homesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled respectively my father and
mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and Spring Hill in Maury County.
Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian faith. My
Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, who