fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of
half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and
replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

The teacher's life is a double one. He stands in a certain fear. He
tends to be stilted, almost dishonest, veiling himself before those
awful eyes. Not the eyes of Almighty God are so straight, so
penetrating, so all-seeing as the wonder-swept eyes of youth. You walk
into a room: to the left is a tall window, bright with colors of crimson
and gold and sunshine. Here are rows of books and there is a table.
Somber blackboards clothe the walls to the right and beside your desk is
the delicate ivory of a nobly cast head. But you see nothing of this:
you see only a silence and eyes,--fringed, soft eyes; hard eyes; eyes
great and small; eyes here so poignant with beauty that the sob
struggles in your throat; eyes there so hard with sorrow that laughter
wells up to meet and beat it back; eyes through which the mockery and
ridicule of hell or some pulse of high heaven may suddenly flash. Ah!
That mighty pause before the class,--that orison and benediction--how
much of my life it has been and made.

I fought earnestly against posing before my class. I tried to be natural
and honest and frank, but it was a bitter hard. What would you say to a
soft, brown face, aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray-black hair,
which knells suddenly: "Do you trust white people?" You do not and you
know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say
you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeat
that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the
while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are
lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God.