he
knew very little about the ace. He said simply that his scholars were
"colored"; and sometimes he called them "the Children of Ham." But so
many mistakes were made over this title, in spite of his careful
explanations (the Children having an undoubted taste for bacon), that he
finally abandoned it, and fell back upon the national name of
"freedmen," a title both good and true. He even tried to make it noble,
speaking to them often of their wonderful lot as the emancipated
teachers and helpers of their race; laying before them their mission in
the future, which was to go over to Africa, and wake out of their long
sloth and slumber the thousands of souls there. But Cassius and Pompey
had only a mythic idea of Africa; they looked at the globe as it was
turned around, they saw it there on the other side, and then their
attention wandered off to an adventurous ant who was making the tour of
Soodan and crossing the mountains of Kong as though they were nothing.

Lessons over, the scholars went home. The schoolmaster went home too,
wiping his forehead as he went. He was a grave young man, tall and thin,
somewhat narrow-chested, with the diffident air of a country student.
And yet this country student was here, far down in the South, hundreds
of miles away from the New Hampshire village where he had thought to
spend his life as teacher of the district school. Extreme
near-sightedness and an inherited delicacy of constitution which he bore
silently had kept him out of the field during the days of the war. "I
should be only an encumbrance," he thought. But, when the war was over,
the fire which had burned within burst forth in the thought, "The
freedmen!" There was work fitted to his hand; that one thing he could
do. "My turn has come at last," he said. "I feel the call to go." Nobody
cared much because he was leaving. "Going down to teach the blacks?"
said the farmers. "I don't see as you're called, David. We've paid dear
enough to set 'em free, goodness knows, and now they ought to look out
for themselves."

"But they must first be taught," said the schoolmaster. "Our
responsibility is great; our task is only just begun."

"Stuff!" said the farmers. What with the graves down in the South, and
the taxes up in the North, they were not prepared to hear any talk about
beginning. Beginning, indeed! They called it ending. The slaves were
freed, and it was right they should be freed; but Ethan and Abner were
gone, and their hous