se of his fiction. Perhaps, to mention the stories, "The Wife of
His Youth," "The Wheel of Progress," and "The House Behind the
Cedars," would serve best for this occasion. There are some situations
of the Negroes too full of ineffable pity for utterance. Who has not
sat at some time in a Negro church and heard read the pitiful inquiry
for a mother, or a child, or a father, husband or wife, all lost in
the sales and separations of slavery times--loved ones as completely
swallowed up in the past (yet in this life they still live) as if the
grave had received them. At such a reading, though it was given with
unconcern, one heard the faithful cry of faithful love coming out of
the dark on its sorrowful mission.

And in this realm Mr. Chestnut tells us of a mulatto boy who marries a
woman of Negro type, and who was old enough for the boy's mother, but
had, at that time, youth enough left to make the disparity of age at
the time of little objection, especially in the times and situation
where there was little objection to marriages of any sort. But the
youth escapes from slavery and in the far North receives education,
development and culture, and in time earns a competence that makes
life desirable and opens up vistas to new happiness, for the old life
is now only a memory of what the new man once was, and the new man is
on the borderland of new love and marriage befitting all his
advancements, while the mulatto slave boy, the slave girl, the black
slave-wife and the slave connections are left forever behind. But in
all these twenty-five years the black slave wife is still living,
still ignorant and yielding all the while to age until she is an old
woman. But there was one thing that did not yield to age and time, and
that was her love for her boy husband, and, what was more, her sublime
and unwavering faith in the constancy of her "Yaller Sam," after whom
she sends inquiry after inquiry, and year after year tramps from place
to place in her search, with faith and love divine ever leading her
on, until one day in a Northern city, to which place she had finally
traced him, she stopped at his very door to humbly inquire of the
strange gentleman she saw for her "Yaller Sam," never dreaming that it
was he to whom she spoke, though he knew her and had to face the
bitter tragedy of it all. But Mr. Chestnut's art enables him to take
care of so sorrowful a case satisfactorily.

"The Wheel of Progress" touches another phase of path