g! En jes you hold yo' head up as high as you want to--you
has de right, en dat I kin swah."

CHAPTER 10

The Nymph Revealed

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had sudden wakings out of
his sleep, and his first thought was, "Oh, joy, it was all a dream!"
Then he laid himself heavily down again, with a groan and the muttered
words, "A nigger! I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead!"

He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror, and then he
resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous sleep. He began to
think. Sufficiently bitter thinkings they were. They wandered along
something after this fashion:

"Why were niggers _and_ whites made? What crime did the uncreated first
nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is
this awful difference made between white and black? . . . How hard the
nigger's fate seems, this morning!--yet until last night such a thought
never entered my head."

He sighed and groaned an hour or more away. Then "Chambers" came humbly
in to say that breakfast was nearly ready. "Tom" blushed scarlet to see
this aristocratic white youth cringe to him, a nigger, and call him
"Young Marster." He said roughly:

"Get out of my sight!" and when the youth was gone, he muttered, "He has
done me no harm, poor wretch, but he is an eyesore to me now, for he is
Driscoll, the young gentleman, and I am a--oh, I wish I was dead!"

A gigantic eruption, like that of Krakatoa a few years ago, with the
accompanying earthquakes, tidal waves, and clouds of volcanic dust,
changes the face of the surrounding landscape beyond recognition,
bringing down the high lands, elevating the low, making fair lakes where
deserts had been, and deserts where green prairies had smiled before.
The tremendous catastrophe which had befallen Tom had changed his moral
landscape in much the same way. Some of his low places he found lifted to
ideals, some of his ideas had sunk to the valleys, and lay there with the
sackcloth and ashes of pumice stone and sulphur on their ruined heads.

For days he wandered in lonely places, thinking, thinking, thinking
--trying to get his bearings. It was new work. If he met a friend, he
found that the h