Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON.
Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the
crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous
right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely vil-
lages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again
came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor
weary of the scene; for this is historic ground. Right across
our track, three hundred and sixty years ago, wandered the
cavalcade of Hernando de Soto, looking for gold and the Great
Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives disappeared yonder in
the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the city of a
hundred hills, with something Western, something Southern,
and something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side
Atlanta is the land of the Cherokees and to the southwest, not
far from where Sam Hose was crucified, you may stand on a
spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem,--the
centre of those nine million men who are America's dark
heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.
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