he who in simple
clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he had flown, "He
will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things." And I, far more
ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit alone winding
words and muttering, "If still he be, and he be There, and there be a
There, let him be happy, O Fate!"

Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and
sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the
children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal
day,--the wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown street
behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in
our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those
pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,--they only
glanced and said, "Niggers!"

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth
there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his
flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain!--for where, O
God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in
peace,--where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is
free?

All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my
heart,--nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the
Veil,--and my soul whispers ever to me saying, "Not dead, not dead, but
escaped; not bond, but free." No bitter meanness now shall sicken his
baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy
boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should
grow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have known that
yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was
peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little
curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which
his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth,
shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty
million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your
ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you
to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life
than a sea of sorrow for you.

Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,--aye,
and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the
end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift