d a Negro's son. Holding in that little head--ah,
bitterly!--he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny
dimpled hand--ah, wearily!--to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and
seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land
whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the
shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city
towering above the blood-red land. I held my face beside his little
cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they
began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my
life.

So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so
tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months
distant from the All-life,--we were not far from worshipping this
revelation of the divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and
moulded itself upon the child; he tinged her every dream and idealized
her every effort. No hands but hers must touch and garnish those
little limbs; no dress or frill must touch them that had not wearied
her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland, and she
and he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue and in it held
communion. I too mused above his little white bed; saw the strength of
my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength
of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the
wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the
Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.

And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the
full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from
the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun
quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta. And then one night
the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny
hands trembled; and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we
knew baby was sick. Ten days he lay there,--a swift week and three
endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the mother nursed him
the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled again.
Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away and Fear
crouched beside the little bed.

Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror, and joy and
sleep slipped away. I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from
dull and dreamless trance,--crying, "The Shadow of