blood crying yet,
WHO HATH REMEMBERED ME? WHO HATH FORGOTTEN?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.

SWINBURNE.

"Unto you a child is born," sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered
into my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of fatherhood
mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and
how it felt--what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled
itself. And I thought in awe of her,--she who had slept with Death to
tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously
wandering. I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to myself
half wonderingly, "Wife and child? Wife and child?"--fled fast and
faster than boat and steam-car, and yet must ever impatiently await
them; away from the hard-voiced city, away from the flickering sea into
my own Berkshire Hills that sit all sadly guarding the gates of
Massachusetts.

Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the
sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to win
a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail
from an unknown world,--all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and
watch perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing. I did not love
it then; it seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my
girl-mother, she whom now I saw unfolding like the glory of the
morning--the transfigured woman. Through her I came to love the wee
thing, as it grew strong; as its little soul unfolded itself in twitter
and cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught the gleam and
flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and
dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect
little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa
had moulded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we had
sped far away from our Southern home,--held him, and glanced at the hot
red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and
felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen
was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed
out and killed the blue?--for brown were his father's eyes, and his
father's father's. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it
fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.

Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,--a
Negro an