In melancholy musing the man tortured by so many contrary emotions and feelings, sat silently gazing at the distant stars and then cried out in anguish of spirit, “Oh! that I should be forced to feel that the Creator of all this grand universe is unjust! That I should regard education and culture as a curse to those foredoomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. That I should realize that refinement is a cankerous limb, a clog and hindrance to a negro, unfitting him for association with his own race and yet impotent to change those innate characteristics inherited by him from his ancestors, that disqualify him from homogeneousness with the white race.” The young man’s voice was full of despair and even something of reproach as his subtle intellect wove the meshes of the adamantine condition that bound him helpless, in agony, to the rack of race inferiority. “Mother Sybella, who has proven herself my great-grandmother, urges me to fly and seek among my own people that surcease from suffering unattainable among the whites. While she fascinates me, she fills me with horror. I am drawn toward her yet I am repelled by something loathsome in the association with her. She seems to possess hypnotic power over my senses; she leads me by some magnetic influence that exerts control over the negro portion of my nature.” “I am ashamed to be seen by the white people, especially the Dunlaps, in familiar conversation with the grandmother of my mother, but in our secret and frequent interviews she has told me much that I was unaware of concerning my ancestors and my mother. I have promised to attend a meeting of my kinsmen tomorrow night, which will be held in a secluded spot near the city, whither she herself will guide me. I do not wish to go. I did not wish to make the promise and appointment to meet her, but was compelled by the overmastering power she wields over the natural proclivities within me. I must meet her and go with her.” The struggle in the dual nature of the man between the contending forces of the innate and the acquired was obvious in the reluctant tone in which, while he admitted that he would obey the innate, he lamented the abandonment of the acquired. “I must go, I feel that I must! My destiny was written ere Shem, Ham and Japhet separated to people the world. I bow to the inevitable! I am pledged to Dupree for dinner tomorrow evening, but I shall excuse myself early, and keep my appointment with Mother Sybella, and accompany her to the meeting of my kindred.” XVI. The cleared spot selected by Mother Sybella as the scene of her mystic ceremonies and the gathering place of the worshipers of Voo Doo, though scarcely beyond the outskirts of the city, was so screened by the umbrageous growth of tropical forest, interlaced with vanilla and grape-vines that festoon every woodland of Haiti, that its presence was not even suspected save by the initiated.