That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of the Fair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them, as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire. On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in medicine, law, and business in the city. They roll along in the joyous freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is. How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows in their faces! “We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.