began
to feel the fineness of his character,--his calm courtesy, the
sweetness of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth
of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the
prophets of the world. Some seer he seemed, that came not from the
crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing Now,--that
mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark, so splendid
and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world of
mine, within the Veil.

He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the
echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to
look back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that
paused over his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas
as he looked down the world. The slave-ship still groaned across the
Atlantic, faint cries burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black
father whispered mad tales of cruelty into those young ears. From the
low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at
nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land
of slaves.

So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of
Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figure
alone,--ever with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father,
and a form that fell in vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation
of Hate grew and shadowed the growing child,--gliding stealthily into
his laughter, fading into his play, and seizing his dreams by day and
night with rough, rude turbulence. So the black boy asked of sky and
sun and flower the never-answered Why? and loved, as he grew, neither
the world nor the world's rough ways.

Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide
land to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same
temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps,
some one will some day lift the Veil,--will come tenderly and cheerily
into those sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as
Beriah Green strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before
the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green
had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous
boys. "I'm going to bring a black boy here to educate," said Beriah
Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say.
"Oho!" laughed the bo