This was the journey he remembered. The actual journey may have
been quite different, but the actual journey has no interest for
education. The memory was all that mattered; and what struck him
most, to remain fresh in his mind all his lifetime, was the
sudden change that came over the world on entering a slave State.
He took education politically. The mere raggedness of outline
could not have seemed wholly new, for even Boston had its ragged
edges, and the town of Quincy was far from being a vision of
neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seen a finished
landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind. The
railway, about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled
through unfenced fields and woods, or through village streets,
among a haphazard variety of pigs, cows, and negro babies, who
might all have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the
Southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care.
This was the boy's impression of what slavery caused, and, for
him, was all it taught. Coming down in the early morning from his
bedroom in his grandmother's house -- still called the Adams
Building in -- F Street and venturing outside into the air
reeking with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found
himself on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks
meandering from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the
white marble columns and fronts of the Post Office and Patent
Office which faced each other in the distance, like white Greek
temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city.
Pages:
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84