uliar even for
one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and
in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in
the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac
and Taghanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put
it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards--ten
cents a package--and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a
tall newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily, with a glance.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different
from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but
shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to
tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common
contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great
wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates
at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their
stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to
fade; for the world I longed for, and all its dazzling opportunities,
were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said;
some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never
decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful
tales that swam in my head,--some way. With other black boys the strife
was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy,
or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust
of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry. Why did God
make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The "shades of the
prison-house" closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to
the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of
night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms
against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly watch the streak of blue
above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields
him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, thi