o meet other worlds, and
gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly sacrifice with frenzied priest
at the altar of the "old-time religion." Then the soft melody and
mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it;
and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a
common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,
from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All
this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe
for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes
twenty-five and more 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 content, 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, "We've had a
heap of trouble since you've been away." I had feared for Jim. With a
cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made
a venturesome merchant or