d of the car and importunes you to the point
of rage to buy cheap candy, Coco-Cola, and worthless, if not vulgar,
books. He yells and swaggers, while a continued stream of white men
saunters back and forth from the smoker to buy and hear. The white train
crew from the baggage car uses the "Jim-Crow" to lounge in and perform
their toilet. The conductor appropriates two seats for himself and his
papers and yells gruffly for your tickets before the train has scarcely
started. It is best not to ask him for information even in the gentlest
tones. His information is for white persons chiefly. It is difficult to
get lunch or clean water. Lunch rooms either don't serve niggers or
serve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall. As for
toilet rooms,--don't! If you have to change cars, be wary of junctions
which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome
white persons who hate a "darky dressed up." You are apt to have the
company of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners on
part of your way and dirty colored section hands will pour in toward
night and drive you to the smallest corner.

"No," said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo
and her dress flowed on her like a caress), "we don't travel much."

* * * * *

Pessimism is cowardice. The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the
"Jim-Crow" car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either
of himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful
denial of human brotherhood than the "Jim-Crow" car of the southern
United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful
in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica.
And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither
can be denied.

* * * * *

The sun, prepared to cross that awful border which men call Night and
Death, marshals his hosts. I seem to see the spears of mighty horsemen
flash golden in the light; empurpled banners flame afar, and the low
thunder of marching hosts thrills with the thunder of the sea. Athwart
his own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, masking
his trained guns. And then the miracle is done. The host passes with
roar too vast for human ear and the sun is set, leaving the frightened
moon and blinded stars.

In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces a