any resentment.  I had not seen the like of this for fifty years.  It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave.  I was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.  My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation.  He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie—­which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort.  He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses.  My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature.  When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly—­as if that were a crime.  It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again.  He was dead in an hour.  I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it.  Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

It is curious—­the space-annihilating power of thought.  For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native’s smitten cheek was not done tingling yet!  Back to boyhood—­fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!

Some natives—­I don’t remember how many—­went into my bedroom, now, and put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to nurse my cough.  It was about nine in the evening.  What a state of things!  For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet—­what a racket it was!  They were yelling orders and messages down three flights.  Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a revolution.