"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. He only thought they might pester the horse to plague him, and the horse might get away and be hurt. We didn't, none of us, think what the white folks would feel, because we didn't know. You did."
"But why should this affect you?"
"Just because it shows that education is something more that I had thought—something so large and difficult that one of my age, raised as I have been, can only get a taste of it at the best."
"Well, what then? You are not discouraged?"