In the soft gray dawn touching with silver the still-life scene about me there was no suggestion of Fifth Avenue ablaze with silk flags, its asphalt strewn with flowers, its sidewalk packed by millions of people come to honor the famous personages who would pass, as in review, before the lions guarding the public library—a marshal of France, a general-in-chief of Italy, a king and his queen, and the future ruler of a great empire—each sent by a grateful country as an expression of gratitude and friendship to the people of the United States. And more thrilling perhaps than any of these parades was that at the head of which marched the President of our country, followed by thousands of women, soldiers who know neither nationality nor creed, and the red cross whose banner symbolizes universal mother love. Then last of all a horde of Jewish children swept along the historic thoroughfare singing psalms of praise, rejoicing over the rebirth of the nation of their fathers—Jerusalem, wrested from Turkish rule, had after centuries again become the capital of the Jewish race. Nor, standing there in that mild November morning, did I dream that within sound of the human voice almost under the eaves of the public library, as it were, I would find superstition more rampant than among the negroes in the Dark Corner of my native State—a county untouched by railroads and cut off from the rest of the world by turbulent rivers, and in which the white children never have more than three months public schooling during a year and negro children much less. No guardian angel warned me of the plague of influenza that, sweeping around the world, would hover over our great city, touching alike with the finger of death those who dwelt in palaces and they who huddled in tenement homes. No suspicion of the coming of nationwide prohibition was planted in my mind, nor, more surprising still, the knowledge that at our next presidential election men and women, equal as citizens, would cast their ballots standing side by side.