Rhoda saw his danger and ran a few rods further down the stream, threw herself on the ground and reached far down to give Jack her hands. In his desperation he lay hold of them with a firm grasp and Rhoda braced herself for a mighty pull. But she was now too far over the bank to gain her poise again, and, with a scream that sounded above the roar of the water, she pitched down upon the head of her jilted lover, and together they went over the falls. He was holding her in his arms when they went over, and then the terrible jam of logs dashed down upon them, while the horrified men on the bank looked helplessly into each other’s eyes and groaned with mental pain. In the village graveyard there are two stones standing side by side, where an old woodsman, now bent with age, visits every spring and places a bunch of flowers between the two. It is Walter Jackson. When he goes away the curious people go to the spot and read the card attached to the flowers: “Jack and Rhoda—They died for me. Even the gods could do no greater thing.” THE HOMESICK BOY “Way down upon de Suanee river, Far, far away. Dah’s whar my heart am turning ebber, Dah’s whar de ole folks stay.” Foster surely knew what it was to be homesick when he wrote those lines. He knew the heart-aches of a homesick boy. What difference whether the homesick boy is white or black? The heart-aches are just the same; the longings just as sad, the memories just as sweet, the absent parents just as sacred, the absent brothers and sisters just as dear. That song makes the greatest appeal to human hearts for sympathy of any song ever sung—sympathy for the black or white boy obliged to go away from home and leave those he loves best on earth. In my mind’s eye I see Foster’s little black boy who is sold into slavery and driven far away from the banks of the Suanee river to the cotton fields of the Southwest. Perhaps not one soul in all the world, besides his mother and little brothers, ever gave the poor slave boy a single thought after he was driven out of sight of the old cabin home. Other boys going away from home—white boys of those days, had all the world before them; but the poor slave boy had only his chains and his broken heart.