Herbert wanted very much to know and yet she feared the
knowledge. As she grew older she often stayed a good deal longer,
and sometimes it was almost a balanced struggle, but she always made
herself escape.

Next to the railroad yard it was the shipping docks that Melanctha
loved best when she wandered. Often she was alone, sometimes she was
with some better kind of black girl, and she would stand a long time
and watch the men working at unloading, and see the steamers do their
coaling, and she would listen with full feeling to the yowling of the
free swinging negroes, as they ran, with their powerful loose jointed
bodies and their childish savage yelling, pushing, carrying, pulling
great loads from the ships to the warehouses.

The men would call out, "Say, Sis, look out or we'll come and catch
yer," or "Hi, there, you yaller girl, come here and we'll take you
sailin'." And then, too, Melanctha would learn to know some of the
serious foreign sailors who told her all sorts of wonders, and a cook
would sometimes take her and her friends over a ship and show where he
made his messes and where the men slept, and where the shops were, and
how everything was made by themselves, right there, on ship board.

Melanctha loved to see these dark and smelly places. She always loved
to watch and talk and listen with men who worked hard. But it was
never from these rougher people that Melanctha tried to learn the ways
that lead to wisdom. In the daylight she always liked to talk with
rough men and to listen to their lives and about their work and their
various ways of doing, but when the darkness covered everything all
over, Melanctha would meet, and stand, and talk with a clerk or a
young shipping agent who had seen her watching, and so it was that she
would try to learn to understand.

And then Melanctha was fond of watching men work on new buildings. She
loved to see them hoisting, digging, sawing and stone cutting. Here,
too, in the daylight, she always learned to know the common workmen.
"Heh, Sis, look out or that rock will fall on you and smash you all
up into little pieces. Do you think you would make a nice jelly?" And
then they would all laugh and feel that their jokes were very funny.
And "Say, you pretty yaller girl, would it scare you bad to stand up
here on top where I be? See if you've got grit and come up here where
I can hold you. All you got to do is to sit still on that there rock
that they're just hoistin', a