rying out this good
intention. The judge had taken occasion to suggest the existence of
these children, and their father's intentions concerning them, to the
distant relatives who had inherited his friend's large estate. They
had chosen to take offense at the suggestion. One had thought it in
shocking bad taste; another considered any mention of such a subject an
insult to his cousin's memory. A third had said, with flashing eyes,
that the woman and her children had already robbed the estate of
enough; that it was a pity the little niggers were not slaves--that
they would have added measurably to the value of the property. Judge
Straight's manner indicated some disapproval of their attitude, and the
settlement of the estate was placed in other hands than his. Now, this
son, with his father's face and his father's voice, stood before his
father's friend, demanding entrance to the golden gate of opportunity,
which society barred to all who bore the blood of the despised race.

As he kept on looking at the boy, who began at length to grow somewhat
embarrassed under this keen scrutiny, the judge's mind reverted to
certain laws and judicial decisions that he had looked up once or twice
in his lifetime. Even the law, the instrument by which tyranny riveted
the chains upon its victims, had revolted now and then against the
senseless and unnatural prejudice by which a race ascribing its
superiority to right of blood permitted a mere suspicion of servile
blood to outweigh a vast preponderance of its own.

"Why, indeed, should he not be a lawyer, or anything else that a man
might be, if it be in him?" asked the judge, speaking rather to himself
than to the boy. "Sit down," he ordered, pointing to a chair on the
other side of the room. That he should ask a colored lad to be seated
in his presence was of itself enough to stamp the judge as eccentric.
"You want to be a lawyer," he went on, adjusting his spectacles. "You
are aware, of course, that you are a negro?"

"I am white," replied the lad, turning back his sleeve and holding out
his arm, "and I am free, as all my people were before me."

The old lawyer shook his head, and fixed his eyes upon the lad with a
slightly quizzical smile. "You are black." he said, "and you are not
free. You cannot travel without your papers; you cannot secure
accommodations at an inn; you could not vote, if you were of age; you
cannot be out after nine o'clock without a permit. If a w