an' you don't get confused
by the printed letters."

Diving into his bulging pockets, he took out a big leather purse, from
which he extracted a dollar and handed it to me. "Let that go toward an
eddication," he said, adding: "If you can get it out of books I'll send
you a dollar toward it every week I live. That's a kind of starter,
anyway, ain't it?"

I replied that I thought it was, and carefully twisted the money into
the torn lining of my pocket.

"I'm goin' back to West Virginy to-night," he resumed. "Arter I've seen
you an' the little sister thar ain't any use my hangin' on out of work."

"Have you got a good place, President?"

"As good as can be expected for a plain man without an eddication," he
responded sadly, and a half hour later, when I said good-by to him, with
a sob, he came to the brow of the hill, with little Jessy clinging to
his hand, and called after me solemnly, "Remember, Benjy boy, what you
want is an eddication!"

So impressed was I by the earnestness of this advice, that as I went
back down the dreary hill, with its musty second-hand clothes' shops,
its noisy barrooms, and its general aspect of decay and poverty, I felt
that my surroundings smothered me because I lacked the peculiar virtue
which enabled a man to overcome the adverse circumstances in which he
was born. The hot August day was drawing to its end, and the stagnant
air in which I moved seemed burdened with sweat until it had become a
tangible thing. The gourd vines were hanging limp now over the negro
hovels, as if the weight of the yellow globes dragged them to the earth;
and in the small square yards at the back, the wilted sunflowers seemed
trying to hide their scorched faces from the last gaze of a too ardent
lover. Whole families had swarmed out into the streets, and from time to
time I stepped over a negro urchin, who lay flat on his stomach,
drinking the juice of an overripe watermelon out of the rind. Above the
dirt and squalor the street cries still rang out from covered wagons
which crawled ceaslessly back and forth from the country to the Old
Market. "Wa-ter-mil-lion. Wa-ter-mil-l-i-o-n! Hyer's yo' Wa-ter-mil-lion
fresh f'om de vi-ne!" And as I shut my eyes against the dirt, and my
nostrils against the odours, I saw always in my imagination the
enchanted garden, with its cool sweet magnolias and laburnums, and its
great white columns from which the swallows flew, with short cries,
toward the sunset.

A white sho