1 First came Josie and her brothers and sisters.
2 Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies.
3 It grieved Josie, and great awkward John walked nine miles every day to see his little brother through the bars of Lebanon jail.
4 And next morning she died in the home that her little bow-legged brother, working and saving, had bought for their widowed mother.
5 Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.
6 Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South.
7 An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then, lingering neither for handshaking nor gossip, started silently up the street, raising his hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed astonishment.