“Oh, God knows, if I ain’t let Mr. Preacher Benton’s soft-boiled egg get as hard as a rock. God knows! Hard as nails!” A wail from a voice that was near its tears.
“Aw, put a little water in it and stir it up. The preacher, he’ll not never know the difference,” the dark girl said.
“I’ll not do so. I’m a fool, I am. I won’t send up no such egg to nobody. I’ll make another one. Poor old Moll. Hand me a egg outen the icebox, Be’y, whilst I make the water boil again. Poor old Moll.” She was weeping now.
From the icebox to the stove with the egg shuffled in his hand. The handsome yellow boy with his melting quiver of eyes and already broken promise, broken in its borning.
I’ll telegraph my baby,
She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....
“Aw Be’y, go on,” Moll was pleading again, won again and rejected. “Aw, Be’y.”
At the Seminary, chapel service was held each morning in the chief assembly hall, the great and the little being required in attendance. The small children sat on the front seats, huddled together, fearful that some impossible thing might be demanded of them. On some mornings there were opening songs, or now and then a girl would walk to the platform and say a piece in a light, pretty voice, or a large boy would pronounce an oration. The song, all singing together, would roll out in a great shaking throb of noise and pain that beat upon sensitive ears and passed inward to become a pleasure, under the noise running the music.
Land where our fathers died,