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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works"

Men are tattooed with their special
beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with
Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all, the patterns of
all earth's thousand tribes!
The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden on
it. He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young girl's
face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that she was a
little angel,--which was in violent contradiction to the leading doctrine
of his sermon on Human Nature. And so he followed her out of the study
into the wide entry of the old-fashioned country-house.
An old black woman sat on the plain oaken settle which humble visitors
waiting to see the minister were wont to occupy. She was old, but how
old it would be very hard to guess. She might be seventy. She might be
ninety. One could not swear she was not a hundred. Black women remain
at a stationary age (to the eyes of white people, at least) for thirty
years. They do not appear to change during this period any more than so
many Trenton trilobites. Bent up, wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long
upper-lip, projecting jaws, retreating chin, still meek features, long
arms, large flat hands with uncolored palms and slightly webbed fingers,
it was impossible not to see in this old creature a hint of the
gradations by which life climbs up through the lower natures to the
highest human developments.


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