"Howdys" and
laughing and joking and jostling. Mother sat yonder in the window
watching; but sister Jennie stood on the platform, nervously fingering
her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyes peering
from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose gloomily as the train
stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim Crow" car; he stepped to the
platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and
dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of
mud. An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all
seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall,
strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and
there; then, lingering neither for handshaking nor gossip, started
silently up the street, raising his hat merely to the last eager old
aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment. The people were distinctly
bewildered. This silent, cold man,--was this John? Where was his
smile and hearty hand-grasp? "'Peared kind o' down in the mouf," said
the Methodist preacher thoughtfully. "Seemed monstus stuck up,"
complained a Baptist sister. But the white postmaster from the edge of
the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks plainly. "That damn
Nigger," said he, as he shouldered the mail and arranged his tobacco,
"has gone North and got plum full o' fool notions; but they won't work
in Altamaha." And the crowd melted away.

The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure. Rain
spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in the ice-cream.
When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing.
The three preachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow
John's manner seemed to throw a blanket over everything,--he seemed so
cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that the
Methodist brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited not a
single "Amen"; the Presbyterian prayer was but feebly responded to, and
even the Baptist preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so
mixed up in his favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping
fully fifteen minutes sooner than he meant. The people moved uneasily
in their seats as John rose to reply. He spoke slowly and
methodically. The age, he said, demanded new ideas; we were far
different from those men of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries,--with broader ideas of human brotherhood and destiny. T