One day Nathalie led the boys to a terrace, a few feet back of a brown-shingled cottage across the road from Peckett’s, and which stood on a lower spur of Garnet Mountain, facing the Franconia Range. Here, on this grassy ridge, gently sloping down to a green meadow below, skirted by a tree-fringed road edging the rocky pasture-land which gradually merged into the lower slopes of the range, she pointed out King Lafayette, and his lower mate, Lincoln, with his two slides. The Sleeping Infant, lying between the latter and Garfield’s sharply defined peak, was immediately heralded by the little maid, Sheila, as the long-lost infant, which some kind-hearted fairy some day, with her magic wand, would awaken. The Twins, and the huge Sleeping Giant, and some of the lower peaks, all came in for a share in the mystic doings of the little girl’s fanciful imagination.
The atmosphere was so translucent that each shaggy crest, pointed dome, and spire of the range, sharply defined against the sapphire-blue of the sky, stood forth with a strange lucidity, seemingly so near that one had the inclination to put forth a hand to touch them.
Lafayette’s craggy foretop, standing up from the deep green-verdured gorge that cleft one side of it, was startlingly like some huge elephant’s head, with a mouse-colored, wrinkly and baggy-skinned trunk. The boys accentuated the resemblance by locating two big rocks, which, they declared, were the beady eyes of the animal, while Sheila insisted she could see the eyes move.
As they rested on the ledge of a little circling wall of cobble-stones, evidently the unfinished foundation of a stone tower, Nathalie told how Lincoln’s rounded dome had been named in honor of a great American named Abraham Lincoln. “Some people used to call him ‘Old Abe,’ or ‘Father Abraham,’ not from any disrespect,” continued the girl, “but because he was so kindly in his nature, his heart so filled with love for mankind, that it was a title of honor, and showed the love of the people for him.”
“Ain’t he the gink that got to be President of the United States, and made the darkies free?” inquired Danny eagerly.
Nathalie nodded, and then led the boy on to tell how Lincoln, from a long-legged, ungainly pioneer youth, brought up in a log cabin in the wilds of Indiana, ended his career as the hero of the greatest republic in the world.
The little newsie told his story importantly, proud to think that he had remembered these odd bits of knowledge from the little schooling he had received. And what he didn’t remember Nathalie did, dwelling at length on the part this leader of men took in freeing the slaves, and what slavery meant to the negroes of the South.
As the little group listened with wide-eyed interest, the girl suddenly cried, “Oh, children! think what it would mean to you if you were not allowed to move about as you pleased, but were forced to do what you did not want to do, although you might be tired and hungry, and were driven about like cattle, and lashed if you disobeyed your master!”
She then explained that all men were born free and equal, and that God never intended that any man should be a bond-servant to his fellow-men. “Every one,” she emphasized, “has the right to enjoy the beautiful things of life without being subjected to cruel treatment, and forced to hard labor, as the slaves had been, just because their skin was black instead of white.
“But there is another kind of slavery.” said Nathalie earnestly, “which, although it may not mean the slavery of the body, like that of the negroes on a plantation, is the slavery of the will. That is, a man may not be lashed on his back, but his will is made subject to another man’s will, and he has to obey and direct his life the way this man says, whether he wants to or not. All over the world, for centuries, the people of different nations have been forced to obey the will of one man, that is, the ruler, or the king, of the nation to which they belonged. The peoples of the world have not been free; they have not had the right, or the liberty, to do as they thought or felt.”