But at a gathering of negroes on a later night I see the same bright strange little man standing unnoticed by himself at one side of the hall, and I go to him and assure him of my sympathy and tell him that I was present the night he was attacked. He passes over that hastily; it was nothing; he has had many such experiences; but when I ask him about himself he answers my questions obligingly, though with some diffidence. He knows nothing of his parents except that before the emancipation one or both were slaves; he has been taught scarcely anything; and has done hard work all his life. In his youth he joined a church and began to preach, but having come soon afterward to see the quality of churches and to be aware of his “mission,” he traveled “north” and began to go about working and preaching. He belongs to no church and disapproves of all alike. He has no property, permitting himself nothing but poverty and labor. Already he is looked down upon as improvident by those who know him. His wife has left him, not relishing her lot with him, for they were forced always to lodge in the poorest parts of the towns they visited. The intolerance and hate of white Americans for negro people made their lives harder than they would otherwise have been. Single rooms near small independent “mission houses,” when there was one that suited, were their temporary homes; and from one such the wife went at last to visit at the town of Nashville in the distant State of Tennessee, and she has not come back. Her intention to do so was vague at her departure. Her husband has suffered a great deal through her desertion and has humbly and pitifully begged her by letter to return, but he has borne her failure to do so and goes on with his work. He is not loved, nor even much liked by anyone, I find later; he and his preaching, his high standards, his belief, his self-reliance and fearlessness, even his good temper, seem disquieting to others, irritating, a bore, something to escape. During that year he remained in the city by the floods preaching and working at hard manual labor. But the next winter, well toward the end, there was an epidemic of pneumonia and my little apostle was stricken suddenly and removed to a cheerless public hospital. There, gasping and choking so horribly that it was almost impossible to watch him, he died the night of his arrival. Nothing but a rickety screen of wood and cloth separated him from a score of other sick men when he died. Next night, washed and dressed in his usual neat clothes, with white linen and a gay colored cravat, the beautiful plump little figure lay in a hideous black coffin with tawdry white lining in the little gloomy mission house that he had found somewhere off on the northern edge of the town. Two or three people watched perfunctorily by the body; but though it was almost spring and the day had been wet, the place grew cold as the night waned, and became almost intolerably dismal and horrible.