Almost unconsciously I grew into sympathy with his ideals and his life, seeing faintly the grand visions that were always clear to him, and bewailing more and more my own indolence and love of pleasure that made them seem so hard for me to reach. I learned to understand the tragedy of his obscure and hidden life, and the long and bitter contest he had waged within the narrow shadow of the stubborn little town where he had lived and struggled and hoped so long. It was many years before I came to know fully that the smaller the world in which we move, the more impossible it is to break the prejudices and conventions that bind us down. And so it was many, many years before I realized what must have been my father’s life. As a little child, I heard my father tell of Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, and the rest of that advance army of reformers, black and white, who went up and down the land arousing the dulled conscience of the people to a sense of justice to the slave. They used to make my father’s home their stopping-place, and any sort of vacant room was the forum where they told of the black man’s wrongs. My father lived to see these disturbers canonized by the public opinion that is ever ready to follow in the wake of a battle fought to a successful end. But when his little world was ready to rejoice with him over the freedom of the slave, he had moved his soiled and tattered tent to a new battlefield and was fighting the same stubborn, sullen, threatening public opinion for a new and yet more doubtful cause. The same determined band of agitators used still to come when I had grown to be a youth. These had seen visions of a higher and broader religious life, and a fuller measure of freedom and justice for the poor than the world had ever known. Like the despised tramp, they seemed to have marked my father’s gate-post, and could not pass his door. They were always poor, often ragged, and a far-off look seemed to haunt their eyes, as if gazing into space at something beyond the stars. Some little room was always found where a handful of my father’s friends would gather, sometimes coming from miles around to listen to the voices crying in the wilderness, calling the heedless world to repent before it should be too late. I cannot remember when I did not go to these little gatherings of the elect and drink in every word that fell upon my ears. Poor boy! I am almost sorry for myself. I listened so rapturously and believed so strongly, and knew so well that the kingdom of heaven would surely come in a little while. And though almost every night through all these long and weary years I have looked with the same unflagging hope for the promised star that should be rising in the east, still it has not come; but no matter how great the trial and disappointment and delay, I am sure I shall always peer out into the darkness for this belated star, until I am so blind that I could not see it if it were really there.