e.

_Selah!_

In yonder East trembles a star.

_Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord!_

Thy Will, O Lord, be done!

_Kyrie Eleison!_

Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words.

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little
children.

_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_

Our voices sink in silence and in night.

_Hear us, good Lord!_

In night, O God of a godless land!

_Amen!_

In silence, O Silent God.

_Selah!_

II

THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human
sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are
that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view
them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I
am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their
language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial
composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge
that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of
artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side.
I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know
that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious.
They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to
them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and
strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts
and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my
tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,--ugly, human.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very
modern thing,--a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The
ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age
regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth
century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great,
Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more
than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden,
emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token,
wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is
inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious
acts; e