d his head
slowly toward him, the jagged scar standing out like a cord above the
open collar of his red shirt.

"Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
Fa-ther, de ye-ar-ur Ju-bi-le-e!"

"If I were to leave you here an hour what would you do, Ben?" asked the
manager suddenly, speaking close to my ear.

I thought for a moment. "Learn to stem tobacco quick'en they do," I
replied at last.

"What have you found out since you came in?"

"That you must strip the leaf off clean and throw it into the big trough
that slides it downstairs somewhere."

A smile crossed his face. "If I give you a job it won't be much more
than running up and down stairs with messages," he said; "that's what a
nigger can't do." He hesitated an instant; "but that's the way I began,"
he added kindly, "under General Bolingbroke."

I looked up quickly, "And was it the way _he_ began?"

"Oh, well, hardly. He belongs to one of the old families, you know. His
father was a great planter and he started on top."

My crestfallen look must have moved his pity, I think, for he said as he
turned away and we walked down the long room, "It ain't the start that
makes the man, youngster, but the man that makes the start."

The doors swung together behind us, and we descended the dark staircase,
with the piercing soprano voices fluting in our ears.

"Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah,
Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah."

* * * * *

That afternoon I went home, full of hope, to my attic in the Old Market
quarter. Then as the weeks went on, and I took my place gradually as a
small laborious worker in the buzzing hive of human industry, whatever
romance had attached itself to the tobacco factory, scattered and
vanished in the hard, dry atmosphere of the reality. My part was to run
errands up and down the dark staircase for the manager of the leaf
department, or to stand for hours on hot days in the stagnant air, amid
the reeking smells of the big room, where the army of "stemmers" rocked
ceaselessly back and forth to the sound of their savage music. In all
those weary weeks I had passed General Bolingbroke but once, and by the
blank look on his great perspiring face, I saw that my hero had
forgotten utterly the incident of my existence. Yet as I turned on the
curbing a