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AN UNKNOWN VISITOR’S SPEECH AT SPELMAN TO A BUZZ SAW Amid the throng of anxious eyes, A trembling voice is heard, ’Tis of a very aged man; We watch without a word, As he speaks his eyes grow dim; The tears run down his cheeks, And every watcher’s eyes are moist, Thinking as he speaks. ’Twas plaited, split and tacked. I lived for eighty years. I suffered pain, severest kind; tt makes me shed these tears. I had the lashes from a whip; ’Twas plaited, split and tacked, When just to please my master’s mind, He used it on my back. “I went to school, but dared go in; I only drove the team, Fair mistress and young master Jim. They viewed the inner scene, I never looked within a book, ‘Till freedom was proclaimed— Oh glory to the Lord on high, Sing praises to His name!” “My dear young friends, you have the chance To climb the turret high. Of wisdom in her wonder house Upward in yonder sky! Ring out the bells; spread wide the news, To him who longs to be, A hero for the cause of right— A Negro, brave and free!” —Ruby M. Peyton, H. S. ’26. Hark, I hear robust rumbling Of some rupture far away; Alas, it comes atumbling ever near; ’Til it beats discordant accents Of a giating, vain medley, With a harmony no one would like to hear. Whether with Coleridge on the ocean, Or with keats upon the shore, It is seldom they are ever understood; When the latter sings of beauty And the former gloom and woe, You are sizzling and awhizzing through the wood. Hush, your loud and wild, harsh screech ing, Cease your woeful muttering mood, Showing some lad what he’s been doing all his days, Mid your humming and your drumming —Ah, your topsy—turvy good, Scarce no need to ask one if it really pays. Read I the Solitary Reaper, Or the mystic Kubla Kan, Or see Shelley feed his spirit to the wind, Seeking wisdom, drinking deeper, Hunting truth that frees the man; While you fasten nets upon the human Mind. Came I vainly here to study Where the stream of knowledge flows? By judge, I’d smash you if I could! To my task I am attentive, But I’m held in the throes Of your sizzling and awhizzing through the wood. A. P. Turner, *24