to school with the idea that the influence of
the teacher will mold the character of the boy, when the magnetic
touch by which the faculties of the boy are sprung doesn't come from
the teacher, but from some boy on the playground and perhaps not the
best boy. Some boys are as potent on the playground as a major-general
on a battle-field. Some persons are like loadstones, they draw, others
are like loads of stone, they have to be drawn.

I have known down South in the days of slavery, coal black queens of
the domestic circle. The cows would come to the cupping as if it were
a spiritual devotion. Maiden mistresses would tell them their love
stories, when they wouldn't tell their own mothers. I am a southern
man, born and reared mid slavery, and I pay this tribute to the black
"mammies" of the South before the war. Down there in that hale, hearty
colored motherhood was laid the foundation of future health and
strength for many a white baby, when otherwise its mother would have
had to see it die. Frail, delicate mothers, who because of slavery had
not done sufficient work to develop physical womanhood, were not able
to nurse their own infants and gave them to the care of vigorous,
healthy colored mothers, who took them to their bosoms and nursed them
into strength. But for that supplemental supply of vigor, but for that
sympathetic partnership in motherhood, much of the most potent manhood
of the South would never have been known.

You who lived in the North before the war, and you who are younger and
have read about the auction block, the slave driver and the
cottonfield cannot understand the attachment between one of these
colored mothers and the white boy or girl she nursed. I know whereof I
speak, for I revere the memory of my old black mammy.

There are verses, written by whom I do not know, the words of which I
cannot recall except a line here and there, hence I take the liberty
to supply the missing lines and revise the verses to express my
feelings for the slave mammy of my childhood.

"She was only a dear old darkey,
In a cabin far away,
Down in the sunny Southland,
Where sunbeams dance and play.
Yet oft in dreams I hear her crooning,
Crooning soft and low:
'Sleep on, baby boy,
The sleep will make you grow.'

"Oft when tired of fighting
In a world so full of wrong;
When wearied and worried
With the tumult and the throng,
I seek again the cabin,
Where dwelt a h