W. E. B. Du Bois · Public domain edition · 63 cards · 19 chapters
W. E. B. Du Bois argues that the color line is the defining problem of the twentieth century and that Black Americans live with a double-consciousness shaped by racism. This deck covers his central concepts, the Veil, and the Reconstruction-era policies and figures discussed in the book.
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Chapter 1 · Question
What does Du Bois declare is the problem of the Twentieth Century?
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Chapter 1 · Answer
In the Forethought, Du Bois states that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." He frames this as a matter of interest not only to black readers but to the Gentle Reader generally, asking that his book be received with charity and that readers seek the grain of truth hidden in it despite his admitted mistakes and foibles.
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XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs4 cards
What does Du Bois declare is the problem of the Twentieth Century?
In the Forethought, Du Bois states that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." He frames this as a matter of interest not only to black readers but to the Gentle Reader generally, asking that his book be received with charity and that readers seek the grain of truth hidden in it despite his admitted mistakes and foibles.
Chapter 1
What does Du Bois say stands before each chapter of the book?
Du Bois writes that before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs—described as some echo of haunting melody from what he calls the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. This framing device ties the chapters to the musical tradition he discusses in the final chapter.
Chapter 1
How does Du Bois describe his own connection to those within the Veil?
Du Bois closes the Forethought by asking whether he need add that he who speaks is "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil." He thus claims a personal, embodied link to the people whose spiritual world he sketches, rather than writing as an outside observer of their lives.
Chapter 1
What does Du Bois say he has tried to sketch in the book?
Du Bois says he has sought to sketch, in vague and uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. He lists chapters on Emancipation and its aftermath, personal leadership, the worlds within and without the Veil, the black peasantry, relations of the sons of master and man, religion, sorrow, and a tale twice told but seldom written.
Chapter 1
I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings2 cards
What does Du Bois mean by 'double-consciousness'?
Du Bois describes it as the peculiar sensation of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that regards one with amused contempt and pity. One feels a twoness—an American, a Negro—two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, kept from being torn asunder only by dogged strength.
Chapter 2
What did Du Bois say the Negro wishes in merging his double self?
He wishes neither older self lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; nor bleach his Negro soul in white Americanism, for Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon, without the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
Chapter 2
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom (part 1)4 cards
According to Du Bois, what is the central problem of the twentieth century?
The author argues that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. He frames the Civil War as one phase of this broader problem, since the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict.
Chapter 3
How did Butler and Fremont differ in handling fugitive slaves?
Butler, in Virginia, declared slave property contraband of war and put the fugitives to work; his action was approved. Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law, but this was hastily countermanded, and his successor Halleck ordered that no slaves be allowed into Union lines and that owners' slaves be returned.
Chapter 3
What did Sherman's Field-order Number Fifteen reserve for freed Negroes?
The order reserved the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, for settlement of Negroes made free by act of war. Du Bois notes the freedmen followed Sherman's march as a starved, naked horde of tens of thousands.
Chapter 3
What did the act of 1865 create, and what were its limits?
It created in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands," to continue during the present War of Rebellion and for one year thereafter. It had supervision of abandoned lands and control of subjects relating to refugees and freedmen, a Commissioner, and up to ten clerks; Du Bois calls it a hasty, vague compromise.
Chapter 3
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom (part 2)3 cards
What powers did the Freedmen's Bureau hold over the unreconstructed South after the 1868 act?
The 1868 act extended the Bureau to July 1868, authorized more assistant commissioners, and let military commanders also serve as assistant commissioners. Du Bois says the Bureau became a full-fledged government: it made, executed, and interpreted laws, levied and collected taxes, defined and punished crime, and used military force. He notes these powers were not exercised continuously or fully.
Chapter 4
What were the Bureau's two main obstacles in organizing free labor?
Du Bois names 'the tyrant and the idler': the slaveholder determined to perpetuate slavery under another name, and the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest. Washington instructed that laborers choose employers freely, with no fixed wages and no peonage. Despite uneven local agents, Du Bois calls the labor work largely successful, aided by freedmen eager to work.
Chapter 4
What does Du Bois call the Bureau's greatest success, and what paradox does he note about it?
Du Bois says the greatest success was planting the free school among Negroes and the idea of free elementary education among all Southern classes. He notes the South's bitter opposition, believing an educated Negro dangerous, and concedes the South was not wholly wrong: education always carries an element of danger and revolution. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded then.
Chapter 4
II. Of the Dawn of Freedom (part 3)3 cards
What does Du Bois say is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau?
Du Bois argues the Bureau's large legacy is "the work it did not do because it could not." He describes the Negro as not free: in the rural South black farmers are peons bound by law and custom, escaping only through death or the penitentiary; in Southern cities they form a segregated servile caste with restricted rights, standing on a peculiar basis before the courts, taxed without representation. The result, he says, is lawlessness and crime.
Chapter 5
How does Du Bois describe the political status of Southern Negroes before the law?
Du Bois states that before the courts, both in law and custom, Negroes stand on a different and peculiar basis. He calls taxation without representation the rule of their political life, and describes them in the South's most cultured sections and cities as a segregated servile caste with restricted rights and privileges. He argues this condition naturally produces lawlessness and crime.
Chapter 5
What is the famous closing claim of this chapter about the Twentieth Century?
Du Bois closes by declaring that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." Before it, he describes a veiled and bowed figure sitting in the King's Highways, fear brooding on the tainted air, and three centuries' thought spent raising and unveiling that bowed human heart, with a new century now at hand for duty and deed.
Chapter 5
III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others4 cards
What three elements made up Washington's programme, and what did Du Bois say was not wholly original about it?
Du Bois describes Washington's programme as industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights. He notes it was not wholly original: Free Negroes from 1830 to war-time had built industrial schools, the American Missionary Association taught trades, and Price and others sought alliance with the best Southerners. Washington's originality lay in linking these together with enthusiasm and energy.
Chapter 6
How did the South and the North each interpret the Atlanta Compromise?
Du Bois says the South read the Atlanta Compromise differently by faction: radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality, while conservatives took it as a generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. Both approved it. Du Bois calls it the most notable thing in Washington's career, and notes its author became the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis.
Chapter 6
What three attitudes can an oppressed group take toward its environment, according to Du Bois?
Du Bois argues that when environment includes men and ideas, not just nature, the imprisoned group may respond with a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion. He traces all three through the history of American Negro leadership.
Chapter 6
Why did Du Bois consider the hushing of honest criticism dangerous?
Du Bois argues that silencing honest opponents is dangerous: it drives some of the best critics into unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others into passionate, intemperate speech that loses listeners. He calls honest criticism from those most nearly touched the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society, and warns that a leader accepted by outer pressure costs the group the education of finding and commissioning its own leaders.
Chapter 6
IV. Of the Meaning of Progress4 cards
Why did Du Bois's schoolchildren sometimes stop attending?
The chapter shows attendance yielding to family need: Mun Eddings explains the crops required the boys, and Lugene's mother says the girl must mind the baby, promising to restart them "next week." When the Lawrences stopped, Du Bois attributed it to the old folks' doubts about book-learning, which he tried to counter by teaching Cicero in simple English with local applications.
Chapter 7
What did the county commissioner's dinner reveal to Du Bois?
After accepting his certificate and discussing pay, the commissioner invited him to stay for dinner, but the household ate first and Du Bois ate alone. He calls this the moment "the awful shadow of the Veil" fell, showing how racial separation structured even ordinary courtesy and hospitality in the rural South.
Chapter 7
How does Du Bois describe the schoolhouse and its furniture?
The school met in a log hut once used by Colonel Wheeler to shelter corn, behind a rail fence and thorn bushes near a spring. It had a doorway where a door once was, a massive rickety fireplace, chinks between logs as windows, a pale blackboard, and a desk of three reinforced boards. Children sat on rough plank benches without backs, sometimes without legs.
Chapter 7
What happened to Josie and Jim in the ten years after Du Bois left?
Returning after ten years, Du Bois learns Josie is dead; her mother says simply, "We've had a heap of trouble since you've been away." Jim, whom Du Bois thought might have become a merchant or West Point cadet with better circumstances, is angry and reckless; charged by Farmer Durham with stealing wheat, he stones the old man and refuses to run, so the constable comes for him.
Chapter 7
V. Of the Wings of Atalanta4 cards
What warning does the Atalanta myth carry for Atlanta and the black world?
The author uses Atalanta, who paused for Hippomenes's golden apples and was cursed, as a warning that Atlanta and the newly awakened black world may treat material prosperity as the goal rather than an incident by the way. He argues wealth is a lever for good, but the danger is interpreting life in dollars and replacing Truth, Beauty, and Goodness with wealth as the ideal.
Chapter 8
What mistake does the author say the founders of Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta made?
He says they were right to ground education in the University, since the broadest knowledge is the foundation. Their mistake was minimizing the problem's gravity, thinking it a matter of years and decades, building quickly and carelessly, lowering standards, and scattering poorly equipped high schools miscalled universities. They also forgot the rule of inequality: some youth were fitted to know, others to dig.
Chapter 8
How does the author describe the shift in Negro leadership and ideals beyond the Veil?
The author argues the old leaders, the black preacher and teacher who embodied ideals of righteousness and knowing, are being replaced by farmers, artisans, porters, and business-men with property and money. He says a parallel change in ideals follows, and the faithful, courteous old type of Negro is passing, just as the old Southern gentleman passes, through the deification of Bread.
Chapter 8
What does the author say is the true goal of a college, as seen at Atlanta University?
Describing the campus and its three hundred students, the author says the college follows old, time-glorified methods of seeking Truth, with a curriculum unchanged since the Pharaohs and Plato. The true college, he argues, has one goal: not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of the life that meat nourishes.
Chapter 8
VI. Of the Training of Black Men4 cards
What three streams of thought does Du Bois say flow from the slave-ship's arrival at Jamestown?
Du Bois identifies three: a stream from the larger world calling for worldwide cooperation and human unity, though shadowed by force and dominion; the older South's belief that God made the Negro a tertium quid between men and cattle, foreordained to walk within the Veil; and the darker half-conscious cry of black men themselves for liberty and opportunity, doubting their own right to demand it.
Chapter 9
What four decades of Southern educational work after the Civil War does Du Bois outline?
Du Bois roughly marks four periods: from the war's close to 1876, uncertain groping with army, mission, and Freedmen's Bureau schools; then ten years of building complete school systems, founding normal schools and colleges for freedmen; then, especially 1885–1895, the South's industrial revolution, with Negro colleges inadequately equipped and common schools reaching only a third of eligible children; and finally the rise of industrial schools, fully recognized from 1895.
Chapter 9
Why does Du Bois argue the critics' 'logical' order of Negro education was historically impossible?
Critics claimed manual training should have come first, then common schools, then higher schools. Du Bois answers that progress is more often a pull than a push—the exceptional man surges forward and lifts others. Universities predated common schools, and Harvard flowered first. In the South, freedmen lacked the intelligence modern workingmen needed, so common schools were required first, and higher schools to train their teachers.
Chapter 9
Why were schools to train Negro teachers necessary before effective common schools could exist?
Du Bois explains that Southern whites would not teach black children and Northern whites could not be had in sufficient numbers. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself. So the most effective help was establishing schools to train Negro teachers. Though critics sneered at the procedure's defects, in a single generation these institutions put thirty thousand black teachers in the South and wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of black people.
Chapter 9
VII. Of the Black Belt4 cards
Why does Du Bois call Georgia the center of the Negro problem?
Du Bois notes that Georgia is the geographical focus of the Negro population: no other state counts a million Negroes among its citizens, a population as large as the whole Union's slave population in 1800. He adds that no other state fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans, making the state central to the problems both now and in the past.
Chapter 10
How did slavery become established in Georgia despite Oglethorpe's opposition?
Du Bois writes that Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel, but Georgia's first inhabitants were not over-nice in their ideas about rum and slaves. Despite the trustees' prohibitions, Georgians took the law into their own hands; judges were pliant, smuggling flagrant, and Whitefield's prayers earnest, so by the mid-eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away and the slave-trade continued for fifty years and more.
Chapter 10
What does Du Bois describe as the condition of the old plantation lands near Albany?
Du Bois describes the land as forlorn and forsaken: the great plantations of the Sheldons, Pellots, and Rensons lie in half ruin or have disappeared, fences are gone, and families wander. Only black tenants remain, paying rack-rent remorselessly to distant owners, so the land is uncared-for and poor. He calls this the Cotton Kingdom, the shadow of a marvellous dream.
Chapter 10
What does Du Bois say about the Jim Crow car on the train south?
Du Bois invites the reader into the Jim Crow Car, noting four other white men and a little white girl with her nurse are already there, and that usually the races are mixed in it while the white coach is all white. He says the car is not so good as the other but fairly clean and comfortable; the discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of the four black men yonder and in his.
Chapter 10
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece (part 1)3 cards
What does Du Bois call the keynote of the Black Belt, and what caused it?
Du Bois says the keynote of the Black Belt is debt—not commercial credit but the mass of the population's continued inability to make income cover expense. He calls it a direct heritage of the wasteful slave regime's economies, emphasized and brought to crisis by Emancipation, compounded by falling cotton prices and out-of-state competition.
Chapter 11
What were the four chief causes Du Bois gives for the wretched Negro homes?
First, long custom from slavery assigned such homes to Negroes, while white laborers would get better. Second, Negroes accustomed to such housing do not demand better, not knowing what better means. Third, landlords fail to see better housing as a good business investment yielding more efficient labor. Fourth, such conditions leave few incentives for the laborer to become a better farmer.
Chapter 11
What does Du Bois identify as the plague-spot in sexual relations, and its origin?
Du Bois argues the plague-spot is easy marriage and easy separation. He says this is no sudden development nor the fruit of Emancipation but the plain heritage of slavery, when slaves 'took up' without ceremony and masters could break unions by sale or transfer. The Negro church has done much to stop it, but only raising the standard of living will cure it.
Chapter 11
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece (part 2)4 cards
Why does the crop-lien system force Black tenants into all-cotton agriculture?
The landlord demands rent in cotton and the merchant accepts mortgages on no other crop, so the tenant cannot diversify. The merchant watches the growing crop, takes possession at market, pays rent, subtracts supply bills, and hands over any remainder. The author argues the direct results are an all-cotton scheme and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant, who must choose between pauperism and crime.
Chapter 12
What did the 1898 Dougherty County figures show about tenant debt?
Of three hundred tenant families, one hundred seventy-five ended the year fourteen thousand dollars in debt, fifty cleared nothing, and seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The author estimates the county's net tenant indebtedness at no less than sixty thousand dollars, concluding that on average most tenants end even or in debt—working for board and clothes.
Chapter 12
How does the author explain the Black Belt and the migration to town?
The author argues the Black Belt (roughly Emancipation to 1880) was primarily a huddling for self-protection and mutual defense, not a move toward better climate or labor. The rush to town since 1880 was the counter-movement of those disappointed in the Black Belt's economic opportunities. In Dougherty County only ten per cent of adults were born there, yet Blacks outnumbered whites four or five to one.
Chapter 12
How does the author answer the charge that Black field-hands are simply 'shiftless'?
The author argues the field-hand's carelessness stems from lack of incentive: they are improvident because improvident acquaintances fare about as well as provident ones, and they see no reason to improve the white man's land. He notes they work hard when they work and have disdain for mere cash. He also says the white landowner's counter-argument—that better wages or land would fail—leaves each side with just enough truth to misunderstand the other.
Chapter 12
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece (part 3)4 cards
What fraction of Dougherty County's black population achieved land ownership, and how stable was it?
Only six per cent of the black population emerged into peasant proprietorship, and even these were not firmly fixed: their numbers grew and shrank with the wavering of the cotton market. The remaining ninety-four per cent struggled for land and failed, and half of them sat in hopeless serfdom.
Chapter 13
How did the size and timing of black landholdings in Dougherty County change between 1890 and 1898?
In 1890 there were forty-four holdings, only nine under forty acres. By 1898 there were eighty-one: forty-nine under forty acres, seventeen of forty to two hundred fifty acres, thirteen of two hundred fifty to one thousand, and two of one thousand or more. The great increase came in small homesteads near town, part of the rush to town.
Chapter 13
Why does the author call the fifteen thousand acres held by Negroes a creditable showing?
The author argues that for a few thousand poor, ignorant field-hands, facing poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation was a tremendous effort. He notes that had they received an economic start at Emancipation and lived in an enlightened, rich community desiring their good, the result might be called small.
Chapter 13
What does the author identify as the other avenue of escape for those who failed to gain land, and what does he say of its results?
Migration to town is the other avenue, and increasing numbers have turned to it, as shown by the growth of small homesteads near town whose owners share in town life. The author asks how many field-hands, tenants, and ruined renters joined that procession, and calls it strange compensation: the sin of the country districts is visited on the town.
Chapter 13
IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man2 cards
What does Du Bois say about residential segregation and who sees whom?
Du Bois argues a physical color-line can usually be drawn in Southern communities, varying from a street dividing nine-tenths of each race to encircled settlements. Segregation by color is largely independent of natural clustering by social grade. Crucially, the best whites and best Negroes almost never live near each other, so both races commonly see the worst of each other—a change from the patriarchal big house.
Chapter 14
What does Du Bois say about the crop-lien system and legal traps?
Du Bois argues the crop-lien system depopulating Southern fields results not simply from Negro shiftlessness but from cunningly devised laws on mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors that conscienceless men use to entrap the unwary. He gives examples: a Georgia farmer who paid for a farm three times yet lost it, and a storekeeper who stripped a debtor's farm without a sheriff, despite homestead exemption laws.
Chapter 14
X. Of the Faith of the Fathers4 cards
What three things characterized the religion of the slave, according to Du Bois?
Du Bois identifies three characteristics: the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The Preacher he calls the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil—leader, politician, orator, and idealist. The Music is the plaintive rhythmic melody with minor cadences, the most original expression of human longing born on American soil. The Frenzy of "Shouting" was the visible manifestation of the Spirit, believed essential to true communion with the Invisible.
Chapter 15
How did Du Bois describe the origin and development of the Negro preacher?
Du Bois traces the preacher to the plantation's Priest or Medicine-man, who served as healer of the sick, interpreter of the Unknown, comforter of the sorrowing, and supernatural avenger of wrong. As bard, physician, judge, and priest within the limits of slavery, he expressed the longing and resentment of an oppressed people. The first church was not initially Christian but an adaptation of heathen rites, later given a Christian veneer.
Chapter 15
What does Du Bois say about the Negro church as a social institution after Emancipation?
Du Bois argues the Negro church is the social centre of Negro life in the United States and the most characteristic expression of African character. A typical church building serves as club-house, hosting Sunday-school, insurance societies, women's and secret societies, entertainments, and lectures. It collects and expends money, finds employment, introduces strangers, and distributes charity. Du Bois notes the 1890 census showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches with over two and a half million enrolled members.
Chapter 15
What two characteristic things does Du Bois note about the Negro church?
First, it became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith—the Baptist Church remained largest with a million and a half communicants, and the Methodists second with nearly a million. Second, as a social institution it antedated by many decades the monogamic Negro home. Du Bois says this fact explains much that is paradoxical in the communistic institution and in the morals of its members, and makes the church peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life of the people.
Chapter 15
XI. Of the Passing of the First-Born4 cards
What does Du Bois see falling across his baby in the Land of the Color-line?
Du Bois sees the shadow of the Veil fall across his baby. He notes the child's golden hair and mixed blue-brown eyes and asks why the brown did not crush out the blue. He concludes that within the Veil the child was born and there shall live, a Negro and a Negro's son, carrying the unbowed pride of a hunted race.
Chapter 16
How does the author describe his son's early relation to the color-line?
The author says his son knew no color-line: the Veil shadowed him but had not yet darkened half his sun. The child loved the white matron and his black nurse, and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. Du Bois claims he and all men are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.
Chapter 16
Why does Du Bois feel an awful gladness after his son's death?
Du Bois says an awful gladness sat in his heart: his soul whispers that the child is not dead but escaped, not bond but free. No bitter meanness or taunt shall sicken his heart or madden his boyhood, and he was spared being taught to cringe within the Veil. Du Bois calls this seeing the world darkly through the Veil.
Chapter 16
What future morning does Du Bois hope for, and who will it come for?
Du Bois hopes for a mighty morning that lifts the Veil and sets the prisoned free. He expects to die in his bonds, but says it may come for fresh young souls who waken to a morning when men ask of a workman 'Can he work?' and of artists 'Do they know?' rather than asking about race. He says this may come long years hence.
Chapter 16
XII. Of Alexander Crummell4 cards
What three temptations does Du Bois say Alexander Crummell met as a child and young man?
Du Bois names the temptation of Hate, which shadowed Crummell's childhood; the temptation of Despair, which came when the General Theological Seminary refused to admit a Negro; and the temptation of Doubt, which struck deepest as his Providence congregation dwindled. Du Bois calls Doubt the hardest, since it made Crummell question the capability and destiny of his own race.
Chapter 17
How did Beriah Green affect Crummell's childhood, and what earlier school attempt failed?
Crummell had first traveled four hundred miles to Canaan, New Hampshire, where godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into a swamp. Beriah Green, a bluff abolitionist with a school in Oneida County, New York, then declared he would bring a black boy there to educate, and his kindness made the shadow of Hate seem less dark.
Chapter 17
What condition did Bishop Onderdonk set for receiving Crummell into his diocese?
Onderdonk said no Negro priest could sit in his church convention and no Negro church could ask for representation there. Crummell refused, replying he would never enter the diocese on such terms. Du Bois frames this refusal as Crummell passing into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, after the earlier Valley of Humiliation.
Chapter 17
What did Crummell identify as his people's great shortcoming, and what plan did he adopt after Despair?
Du Bois writes that Crummell saw, beneath the slavery and servitude of the Negro people, a dearth of strong moral character and unbending righteousness, which long mistreatment had emphasized. He resolved to gather the best of his people into a little Episcopal chapel to lead, teach, and inspire them until the leaven spread. Du Bois notes only an after-glow of his first vision remained.
Chapter 17
XIII. Of the Coming of John2 cards
Why was John Jones suspended from Wells Institute?
The faculty voted to suspend him for the rest of the term because of repeated disorder and inattention to work. He was loud, boisterous, never able to work consecutively, and did not know how to study. The Dean explained his tardiness, carelessness, poor lessons, and neglected work until John hung his head.
Chapter 18
What promise did John extract from the Dean after being suspended?
John asked the Dean not to write to his mother and sister about the suspension. In exchange, he promised to go into the city to work and return next term to show the Dean something. The Dean promised faithfully, and John left with a sober, set face.
Chapter 18
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Text used: Project Gutenberg eBook #408 (Public domain in the United States). Generated from the full text; cards paraphrase the source.
Version: Public domain edition. Retrieved 2026-10-18. Cards reviewed 2026-10-18.
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