ys. "Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander came.
Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and
hungry, four hundred miles up into free New Hampshire, to Canaan. But
the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition
schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp. The black boy
trudged away.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,--the age when
half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark
of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and
tramps and thieves, and millionaires and--sometimes--Negroes, became
throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we
half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow
and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?" And then
all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World
of Worlds, how shall man make you one?"

So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a
revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which they
had not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of
sympathy and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thing--the temptation
of Hate, that hovered between him and the world--grew fainter and less
sinister. It did not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and
lingered thick at the edges. Through it the child now first saw the
blue and gold of life,--the sun-swept road that ran 'twixt heaven and
earth until in one far-off wan wavering line they met and kissed. A
vision of life came to the growing boy,--mystic, wonderful. He raised
his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air.
Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting
through the trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation
calling,--calling faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank
of their chains; he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within
him a protest and a prophecy. And he girded himself to walk down the
world.

A voice and vision called him to be a priest,--a seer to lead the
uncalled out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turn
toward him like the whirling of mad waters,--he stretched forth his
hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there
swept across the vision the temptation of Despair.

They were not wicked men,--the problem of life is not the problem of
the wicked,--th