"Now," said he, when he had gotten on well with his introduction, "you must not believe you will surely receive precisely the thing you ask for in just the way you might like it. Let me give you an illustration from my personal experience. When a little boy, I lived with my mother on the southern slope of Lookout Mountain, and remember well the day that Gen. Hooker fought his great battle up there and how he and his soldiers marched bravely away. For a long time the children and the grown people searched the battle-fields over, day after day, hoping to find things of value. My mother made it her business to hunt for bullets, and at length the number she gathered herself and took from us boys was so great that she was able to purchase a cow with the money they brought. "A benevolent gentleman living in New York at this time soon after secured the Government buildings on the top of the mountain that had been used for the sick soldiers, and fitted them up nicely for Northern teachers, who opened a boarding-school for white students. I took milk to the institution from our cow, every morning, and how I wished that I might gain admittance to the school and procure an education! One day I heard the scholars reciting in concert, 'Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.' It came over me most powerfully and I repeated it again and again. I said it to my mother, and inquired of her what it meant, and why it impressed me so, and who it was that said it. "She replied, 'I dunno. I reckon I'se heard dem words afore. 'Pears like dey was spoke by the bressed Lord.' "The more I thought of it, the more undecided I was what I could do, or what my mother could do for me, I knew, however, that the Lord could do everything. "Well, the nest time I met the good-natured teacher who managed the school, I made bold to ask him to allow me to tell him all about it, and this was his reply. 'Our Lord made that promise long before the discovery of America and the establishment of the peculiar institutions of this country. If he had lived at this day, I reckon,' he continued with a look of drollery, 'he would have said "Ask and ye shall receive--if you aint a nigger." I can't take you into my school because you are black, but I'll send you down to the American Missionary school at Chattanooga. You can ask and receive there whether you are black or white.' "So, shortly after he told my experience to the teacher in the town, who arranged that my mother should take me and the cow to a little farm just out of the city, giving me an opportunity to attend his school regularly until I was fitted to enter an institution of a higher grade. I then went away and pursued a course of study for six years, teaching during the summer and receiving aid from my mother, who kept the cow all the while for her own support and my assistance. I asked, I received, but not just in the way I hoped."