"
"Might he not have meant any or all of these?" she asked.
"That is it," he replied. "I want to know what he _did_ mean.
Of course, if I knew all about his life and ways, and the like,
I could tell pretty fully his meaning. You know them because his
thoughts are your thoughts, his life has been your life. You belong
to the same race and class. I am cut off from this, and can only
stumble slowly along the path of knowledge."
Thus the simple-minded colored man, taught to meditate by the
solitude which his affliction enforced upon him, speculated in
regard to the _leges non scripta_ which control the action of
the human mind and condition its progress.
"What has put you in this strange mood, Eliab?" asked the teacher
wonderingly.
His face flushed, and the mobile mouth twitched with emotion as
he glanced earnestly toward her, and then, with an air of sudden
resolution, said:
"Well, you see, that matter of the election--you took it all in
in a minute, when the horse came back. You knew the white folks
would feel aggravated by that procession, and there would be
trouble. Now, I never thought of that. I just thought it was nice
to be free, and have our own music and march under that dear old
flag to do the work of free men and citizens. That was all."
"But Nimbus thought of it, and that was why he sent back the horse,"
she answered.
"Not at all.
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