hich he always carried
with him) in quiet contemplation."[180]

There was no blemish in the entire record of his singularly active and
useful life. His whole span of years appears to have been spent with a
conscience void of offense, and he approached the end with a
sereneness of mind well befitting the high ideals set before him.
Although his body never wandered far from the place of his birth, his
mind was permitted to soar through all space and to dwell in the
regions of the stars and the planets. We can never know how sorely his
finer spirit grieved over the tribulations that beset his blood
kinsmen in the days of their bondage in this land of their birth, but
we can well believe that in the loftiness of his soul he dreamed the
dream of their ultimate release.

As the shadows gathered about him towards the evening of his life he
abandoned those pursuits that had brought him merited distinction, and
had gained for him the admiration of a host of friends chiefly among
people that the world called superior. One beautiful Sabbath
afternoon, in the month of October, 1806,[181] while quietly resting
in the shade of a tree beside his cottage on the brow of a hill that
overlooked the Patapsco Valley he seemed to hear the voices that
beckoned him to the other world. And as if stirred by some sudden
impulse he rose and made an effort to walk once more along the paths
that had so often been his quiet retreat in the moments of his deep
reflections. He had not gone far, when his strength gave way, and he
sank helpless to the ground. He was assisted back to his home by a
friendly neighbor, but the noon of his day having fully merged into
the evening, the dark shadows of Eternal Night settled over him.

Directly after Banneker's death, in fact, on that very day, his
sisters, Minta Black and Mollie Morton, undertook to carry out his
wishes with respect to the disposition to be made of his personal
effects. Banneker had, a few years before, directed that "all the
articles which had been presented to him by George Ellicott,
consisting of his books and mathematical instruments, and the table on
which he made his calculations should be returned as soon as he should
die."[182] He also requested that "as an acknowledgment of a debt of
gratitude for Ellicott's long-continued kindness he should be given a
volume of the manuscripts containing all his almanacs, his
observations on various subjects, his letter to Thomas Jefferson, and
the