It is best not to ask him for information even in the gentlest tones.  His information is for white persons chiefly.  It is difficult to get lunch or clean water.  Lunch rooms either don’t serve niggers or serve them at some dirty and ill-attended hole in the wall.  As for toilet rooms,—­don’t!  If you have to change cars, be wary of junctions which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome white persons who hate a “darky dressed up.”  You are apt to have the company of a sheriff and a couple of meek or sullen black prisoners on part of your way and dirty colored section hands will pour in toward night and drive you to the smallest corner.

“No,” said the little lady in the corner (she looked like an ivory cameo and her dress flowed on her like a caress), “we don’t travel much.”

* * * * *

Pessimism is cowardice.  The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the “Jim-Crow” car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world.  There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the “Jim-Crow” car of the southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica.  And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied.

* * * * *

The sun, prepared to cross that awful border which men call Night and Death, marshals his hosts.  I seem to see the spears of mighty horsemen flash golden in the light; empurpled banners flame afar, and the low thunder of marching hosts thrills with the thunder of the sea.  Athwart his own path, screening a face of fire, he throws cloud masses, masking his trained guns.  And then the miracle is done.  The host passes with roar too vast for human ear and the sun is set, leaving the frightened moon and blinded stars.

In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretch their fan-like fingers, lifting themselves proudly, lest any lordly leaf should know the taint of earth.

Out from the isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around the bay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows.  Ghost rains sweep down, smearing his rugged sides, yet on he writhes, undulant with pine and palm, gleaming until his low, sharp head and lambent tongue, grown gray and pale and silver in the dying day, kisses the molten gold of the golden sea.

Then comes the moon.  Like fireflies nesting in the hand of God gleams the city, dim-swathed by fairy palms.  A long, thin thumb, mist-mighty, points shadowy to the Spanish Main, while through the fingers foam the Seven Seas.  Above the calm and gold-green moon, beneath the wind-wet earth; and here, alone, my soul enchained, enchanted!

* * * * *