And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark
form that ever hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights
of Swain Hall,--for Jones is never on time. A long, strag-
gling fellow he is, brown and hard-haired, who seems to be
growing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a half-
apologetic roll. He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-
room into waves of merriment, as he stole to his place after
the bell had tapped for prayers; he seemed so perfectly awk-
ward. And yet one glance at his face made one forgive him
much,--that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of
art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and
genuine satisfaction with the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath
the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea
croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half
drowned beneath the waters, rising only here and there in
long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a
good boy,--fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields, handy
everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful. But
they shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him
off to school.
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