One day in the early spring Mr. Drury dropped in to the Farwell store and asked J.W. if he would be busy that night.  The road to Deep Creek was at its spring worst, and J.W. had nothing special on.  He said as much, and answering his look of inquiry the pastor said, “There’s a man speaking at Saint Marks to-night who’s a Yale graduate and a Negro.  He’s also a Methodist.  Does the combination interest you?”

“Why, yes,” J.W. answered, “it might.  You know I used to go with the bunch to Saint Marks when Brother Officer was pastor, but I haven’t been since he left.  I’d like to see what the new preacher is doing, and it ought to be worth something to hear a Negro alumnus of Yale.”

William Hightower, it seemed, was the speaker’s name—­a strong-voiced; confident man in his thirties.  As J.W., soon discovered, Hightower was a distinctively modern Negro.  Where King Officer had been almost cringing, Hightower’s thought, however diplomatically spoken, was that of an up-standing mind; where Officer accepted as part of the social order the colored man’s dependence on the white, Hightower spoke of something he called racial solidarity.  It was plain that he meant his Negro hearers to make much of the Negro’s capacity for self-direction.

There was little bitterness and no radicalism in the speech, but to J.W. it had a queer, new note.  He said as much to Mr. Drury, on the way home.  “Why, that Hightower hardly ever mentioned the church, although he was speaking at a church meeting.  And how independent he was!”

“So you noticed that, did you?” the pastor responded.  “To me it is one of the signs of a new day.”

“But do you think it is a good day, Mr. Drury?” queried J.W.

“Yes—­perhaps; I don’t know.  Anyhow, it is new, and some of the blame for it is on our shoulders.  The way the Negro thinks and feels to-day is a striking proof of the fact, often forgotten, that when you settle old questions you raise new ones.”

“Maybe,” said J.W. doubtfully, “but I didn’t know we had settled the Negro question.”

“Nor I,” agreed Mr. Drury.  “What we—­I mean, we Methodists—­settled when we began to deal with the Negro right after emancipation was not the race question.  It was not even a missionary question, in the old sense, but it was the question of the nature of the education we should give the young colored people.  For we set out deliberately to give them schooling first, with evangelism as an accompaniment.  The stress was on education, and we decided at the outset on a certain sort of education.”

“I should think,” ventured J.W., “that any old sort of education would serve; the first teachers had to begin at the bottom, didn’t they?”

“Yes, and lower than any beginnings you know anything about,” the pastor replied.  “Our first workers began without equipment, without encouragement, and without everything else except a great pity for the freedman.  Did you notice, by the way, that the speaker to-night never said ‘freedman’ or mentioned slavery?  It is a new day, I tell you.”