its stem.

"Ain't I done tole you how 'tis?" demanded the negress in exasperation,
rising from her seat on the curbing, "en wat mek you keep on axin' over
wat I done tole you?"

She went off muttering to herself, while she clenched the stem of her
corncob pipe between her toothless gums; and picking up my basket and
whistling to Samuel, I walked slowly downhill, with the problem of the
future working excitedly in my brain.

"A market boy is obliged to be a common boy," I thought, and
immediately: "Then I will not be a market boy any longer."

So hopeless the next instant did my present condition of abject
ignorance appear to me, that I found myself regretting that I had not
asked advice of the aged negress who had rested beside me in the shadow
of the sycamore. I wondered if she would consider the selling of
newspapers a less degrading employment than the hawking of vegetables,
and with the thought, I saw stretching before me, in all its alluring
brightness, that royal road of success which leads from the castle of
dreams. One instant I resolved to start life as a fruit vender on the
train, and the next I was wildly imagining myself the president of the
Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, with a jingling bunch of
seals and a gold-headed stick. When at last I reached the Old Market I
found that the gayety had departed from it, and it appeared slovenly and
disgusting to my awakened eyes. The fruit and vegetables, so fresh and
inviting in the early morning, were now stale and wilted; a swarm of
flies hung like a black cloud around the joint suspended before the
stall of Perkins, the butcher; and as I passed the stand of the fish
dealer, the odour of decaying fish entered my nostrils. Was it the same
place I had left only a few hours before, or what sudden change in
myself had revealed to me the grim ugliness of its aspect? "He's a
common boy," the little girl had said of me almost four years ago, and I
felt now, as I had felt then, the sting of a whip on my bare flesh at
her words. Come what might I would cease to be "a common boy" from that
hour.

In the afternoon I bought an armful of "The Evening Planet," and
wandered up Franklin Street on a venture, crying the papers aloud with
an agreeable assurance that I had deserted huckstering to enter
journalism. As I passed the garden of the old grey house my voice rang
out shrilly, yet with a quavering note in it, "Eve-ning Pla-net!" and
almost before the sound had