He set himself to please her—and he did.
She loaned him books, gave him a lead-pencil, and showed him how to write with a pen without smearing his hands and face with ink.
He told her of his dream and asked about Armstrong and Hampton. She told him that Armstrong was the man and Hampton the place.
At last he got her consent to leave and go to Hampton.
When he started she gave him a comb, a toothbrush, two handkerchiefs and a pair of shoes. He had been working for her for a year, and she thought, of course, he saved his wages. He never told her that his money had gone to keep the family, because his stepfather had been on a strike and therefore out of work.
So the boy started away for Hampton. It was five hundred miles away. He didn't know how far five hundred miles is—nobody does unless he has walked it.
He had three dollars, so he gaily paid for a seat in the stage. At the end of the first day he was forty miles from home and out of money. He slept in a barn, and a colored woman handed him a ham-bone and a chunk of bread out of the kitchen-window, and looked the other way.
He trudged on east—always and forever east—towards the rising sun.
He walked weeks—months—years, he thought. He kept no track of the days. He carried his shoes as a matter of economy.
Finally he sold the shoes for four dollars to a man who paid him ten cents cash down, and promised to pay the rest when they should meet at Hampton. Nearly forty years have passed and they have never met.