Excerpt from Plea of the Negro Soldier: And a Hundred Other Poems It you had been deprived of an education in your early youth; if then you had run away from home to obtain that education and found, after some ten or eleven years of knocking and being knocked about, that you could not save money enough out of your scant earnings to pay for your schooling; if, during those years, you had traveled through nearly every state between Bos ton and San Francisco and from Virginia, Ten~ hessee and Arkansas to the southern part of Canada, being compelled to work, generally, in menial positions if you wished to keep from starving; you would not think you had been very fortunate in life. If you had walked the streets of a great city by day, sometimes with only five cents in your pockets and only a scant meal in your stomach for several hours, and all one December night stood/ in the archway of a church door to rest from a weary day of job hunting; if you had lived upon scant means, compelled to support yourselfoften being physically hungry in an endeavor to satisfy your mental hunger for knowledge; it, again. You had been compelled to leave school for a year or two because of lack of means; you would think that yours was indeed a hard, rough lot. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.