after its tail, all his life, if he were going around explaining all his expressions and all the things he had written. Let them go. They will correct themselves. The average and general influence of a man's teaching will be more mighty than any single misconception, or misapprehension through misconception. "There is a deep enjoyment in having devoted yourself, soul and body, to the welfare of your fellowmen, so that you have no thought and no care but for them. There is a pleasure in that which is never touched by any ordinary experiences in human life. It is the highest. I look back to my missionary days as being transcendently the happiest period of my life. The sweetest pleasures I have ever known are not those that I have now, but those that I remember, when I was unknown, in an unknown land, among a scattered people, mostly poor, and to whom I had to go and preach the Gospel, man by man, house by house, gathering them on Sundays, a few--twenty, fifty, or a hundred as the case might be--and preaching the Gospel more formally to them as they were able to bear it." BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1858-1915) THE BOY WHO SLEPT UNDER THE SIDEWALK Two or three years before the outbreak of the Civil War a little black baby was born in the slave quarters on a Virginia plantation. This was not a surprising event and nobody except the mother paid it any attention. Even the father of the child ignored it. For some years the boy "just growed," after the manner of Topsy. Nobody helped him. But the boy differed in one way from his thoughtless little playmates. There was a mysterious something in him that drove him eagerly to avail himself of any opportunity for self-improvement that came along. If the opportunity, as generally happened, _failed_ to "come along," he went after it with all his might and main. He devoted his life unreservedly to the service of his coloured brethren, and through his own bitter experience he knew full well the best way in which to help them. From "Up From Slavery," by Booker T. Washington. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901. I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a crossroads post-office called Hale's Ford and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters, the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.