One day a couple of weeks after my father had been to see us, a wagon drove up to our cottage loaded with a big box.  I was about to tell the men on the wagon that they had made a mistake, when my mother, acting darkly wise, told them to bring their load in; she had them unpack the box, and quickly there was evolved from the boards, paper, and other packing material a beautiful, brand-new, upright piano.  Then she informed me that it was a present to me from my father.  I at once sat down and ran my fingers over the keys; the full, mellow tone of the instrument was ravishing.  I thought, almost remorsefully, of how I had left my father; but, even so, there momentarily crossed my mind a feeling of disappointment that the piano was not a grand.  The new instrument greatly increased the pleasure of my hours of study and practice at home.

Shortly after this I was made a member of the boys’ choir, it being found that I possessed a clear, strong soprano voice.  I enjoyed the singing very much.  About a year later I began the study of the pipe organ and the theory of music; and before I finished the grammar school, I had written out several simple preludes for organ which won the admiration of my teacher, and which he did me the honor to play at services.

The older I grew, the more thought I gave to the question of my mother’s and my position, and what was our exact relation to the world in general.  My idea of the whole matter was rather hazy.  My study of United States history had been confined to those periods which were designated in my book as “Discovery,” “Colonial,” “Revolutionary,” and “Constitutional.”  I now began to study about the Civil War, but the story was told in such a condensed and skipping style that I gained from it very little real information.  It is a marvel how children ever learn any history out of books of that sort.  And, too, I began now to read the newspapers; I often saw articles which aroused my curiosity, but did not enlighten me.  But one day I drew from the circulating library a book that cleared the whole mystery, a book that I read with the same feverish intensity with which I had read the old Bible stories, a book that gave me my first perspective of the life I was entering; that book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This work of Harriet Beecher Stowe has been the object of much unfavorable criticism.  It has been assailed, not only as fiction of the most imaginative sort, but as being a direct misrepresentation.  Several successful attempts have lately been made to displace the book from Northern school libraries.  Its critics would brush it aside with the remark that there never was a Negro as good as Uncle Tom, nor a slave-holder as bad as Legree.  For my part, I was never an admirer of Uncle Tom, nor of his type of goodness; but I believe that there were lots of old Negroes as foolishly good as he; the proof of which is that they knowingly stayed and worked the plantations that furnished sinews for the army which was fighting