I was down on the program for one number.  My selection might have appeared at that particular time as a bit of affectation, but I considered it deeply appropriate; I played Beethoven’s “Sonata Pathetique.”  When I sat down at the piano and glanced into the faces of the several hundreds of people who were there solely on account of love or sympathy for me, emotions swelled in my heart which enabled me to play the “Pathetique” as I could never again play it.  When the last tone died away, the few who began to applaud were hushed by the silence of the others; and for once I played without receiving an encore.

The benefit yielded me a little more than two hundred dollars, thus raising my cash capital to about four hundred dollars.  I still held to my determination of going to college; so it was now a question of trying to squeeze through a year at Harvard or going to Atlanta, where the money I had would pay my actual expenses for at least two years.  The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.

IV

The farther I got below Washington, the more disappointed I became in the appearance of the country.  I peered through the car windows, looking in vain for the luxuriant semi-tropical scenery which I had pictured in my mind.  I did not find the grass so green, nor the woods so beautiful, nor the flowers so plentiful, as they were in Connecticut.  Instead, the red earth partly covered by tough, scrawny grass, the muddy, straggling roads, the cottages of unpainted pine boards, and the clay-daubed huts imparted a “burnt up” impression.  Occasionally we ran through a little white and green village that was like an oasis in a desert.

When I reached Atlanta, my steadily increasing disappointment was not lessened.  I found it a big, dull, red town.  This dull red color of that part of the South I was then seeing had much, I think, to do with the extreme depression of my spirits—­no public squares, no fountains, dingy street-cars, and, with the exception of three or four principal thoroughfares, unpaved streets.  It was raining when I arrived and some of these unpaved streets were absolutely impassable.  Wheels sank to the hubs in red mire, and I actually stood for an hour and watched four or five men work to save a mule, which had stepped into a deep sink, from drowning, or, rather, suffocating in the mud.  The Atlanta of today is a new city.