ould try nothing
more that morning. It had brought him nothing but rebuffs. He
hastened home and threw himself down on the sofa to try and think out
his situation.

"Do they still require of us bricks without straw? I thought all that
was over. Well, I suspect that I will have to ask Mr. Featherton to
speak to his head-waiter in my behalf. I wonder if the head-waiter
will demand my diploma. Webb Davis, you were nearer right than I
thought."

He spent the day in the house thinking and planning.

PART III

Halliday was not a man to be discouraged easily, and for the next few
weeks he kept up an unflagging search for work. He found that there
were more Feathertons and Stockards than he had ever looked to find.
Everywhere that he turned his face, anything but the most menial work
was denied him. He thought once of going away from Broughton, but
would he find it any better anywhere else, he asked himself? He
determined to stay and fight it out there for two reasons. First,
because he held that it would be cowardice to run away, and secondly,
because he felt that he was not fighting a local disease, but was
bringing the force of his life to bear upon a national evil. Broughton
was as good a place to begin curative measures as elsewhere.

There was one refuge which was open to him, and which he fought
against with all his might. For years now, from as far back as he
could remember, the colored graduates had "gone South to teach." This
course was now recommended to him. Indeed, his own family quite
approved of it, and when he still stood out against the scheme, people
began to say that Bertram Halliday did not want work; he wanted to be
a gentleman.

But Halliday knew that the South had plenty of material, and year by
year was raising and training her own teachers. He knew that the time
would come, if it were not present when it would be impossible to go
South to teach, and he felt it to be essential that the North should
be trained in a manner looking to the employment of her own negroes.
So he stayed. But he was only human, and when the tide of talk anent
his indolence began to ebb and flow about him, he availed himself of
the only expedient that could arrest it.

When he went back to the great factory where he had seen and talked
with Mr. Stockard, he went around to another door and this time asked
for the head janitor. This individual, a genial Irishman, took stock
of Halliday at a glance.

"But what do ye w