09-01 and 13-04, eager to show me things outside the compass of my poor experience, would of a time take me to an oyster house or the court-house or a drilling of the regiments, that I might see the commerce of the world.

It was Dr. 09-01’s way to use all that we gazed upon as a lesson, and so demonstrate to me that knowledge and inquiry curled larval in all matter, awaiting release. As we passed the shipyard where the loftsmen raised the shape of a hull according to the measurements of a model, he taught me the secret of numerical proportions and scale. As we watched sailors and stevedores laboring up and down gangplanks, unloading cargo, or men and women smoking their pipes before shops that lined the wharf, or the haggling in the marketplace at Faneuil Hall, he posed me questions about expense, or told me of the trade of wood or molasses.

As we walked through the evening crowds, he was often distracted by activity, and countered my many holiday questions with enigmatical answers, as was often his wont. When I asked why time moved forward, he answered, “Because we have eyes on the front of our heads”; when I asked why we clung to the Earth, he answered, “Because the Earth tries so hard to hurl us off”; and when, my hand clinging to his cuff, I asked him why he was not a father, he answered, “Because there are many uses for sheeps’ guts.”

I asked him about color, and of what it consisted; and he told me that color — brown, black, white — resides in the eye of the beholder; that it does not inhere in the object itself, any more than pain dwells in the needle. So we spake as we walked amongst the servants purchasing their masters’ dinners at the market.

Those were not easy times, in that city; the signs of disquiet were everywhere apparent. Soldiers were constantly among us, dispatched from far corners of the Empire to watch us; they did not stand easy upon the street corners, but stood in groups of two or three, their red coats bright in the bitter, falling snow, blowing upon their hands near hostile alleys; and they watched carefully those who passed, and they whispered jibes about the girth of fat men, the staleness of widows, and the bosoms of girls.

On some summer nights, when it was hot and the atmosphere itself seemed cut with anger — the buzzing of the cicadas in the trees of the avenue harsh with it, broiling — on those nights, we could hear mobs go by in the streets, issuing out from the docks. There were riots there, and men tumbled off the piers, pushed by crowds; wealth would not deign to pass through those quarters, for fear of what was yelled and what was thrown.

I gave little thought to the debates regarding taxation by our Parliament. When the King’s ministers demanded that the Colonies pay the costs of the Indian and French wars, wherein the armies of our nation had fought with such abandon in my extreme youth to secure our borders from, as they said, the incursions of savagery, I had no memory of the conflicts, and no property with which to pay, and so taxation or no seemed all the same to me. I little could comprehend the ire these measures raised. I did not understand the complaints of Mr. 03-01 and his merchant brothers, uncles, nephews, and cousins, the others in the 03 series.

I did not understand the nonimportation compacts which my countrymen in their anger had raised against English products. I did not understand the measures some took against merchants who still carried British goods.

I did not understand the cries of “Liberty and Property!”

I did not understand when I saw a dry-goods store which had been besieged: the windows broken, the bolts of cloth lying half-unraveled out in the slush while rain fell upon them and the curtains blew out of the casements. The draper sat upon the cobbles of the street, his hair lank, and a daughter of perhaps my age wandered about through the wreckage, picking up silks and attempting to drag them back inside.

I did not understand when I saw boys urinating on the stone stoop of the store while men stood about and approved their micturation.

“Higher, boy,” said one. “Write ‘Tyranny’ upon the door.”

I did not understand these scenes of strife. I did not understand why men were hanged in effigy, or a boat dragged through town and burned on the Common, as if on grassy swells. I did not understand why a man dressed in a grinning mask rode through the streets publishing forth elegant threats — this last being a figure of our town’s Pope’s Day, who rode on an ass accompanied by imps, whistling high and eerie to draw rowdy boys from their sheds. I was told he was called Joyce Jr., and that he was a lord of chaos, possessed by the spirit of him who had cut off the crowned head of the King of England in the days of Cromwell. I understood none of these prodigious things.

I did not comprehend that my own domestic scene was threatened by these tumults; that Mr. 03-01 kept us in our finery and excellent foods through revenues from trade and speculation, and that these were suffering grievously. His young nephews and cousins — a brood of Gitneys he called “The Young Men”— would come to dine with grim faces. They brought word of ships waylaid for smuggling by Customs men, goods that could no longer be imported, and sundry losses.

The merchants of Boston had for some decades made some portion of their fortunes through smuggling, the Young Men of the Gitney family being, in this respect, no exception. In their circle, it was held to be no disgrace to import goods illegally, but rather sharp practice was accounted a sign of canny business acumen. They cursed Parliament roundly for interference in their business.

I did not understand that these interviews, so tedious to the young, did not simply regard numbers, but extended to the table we ate around, the excellent paneling on the walls, the paintings that looked down upon us.

Blithely, I believed business was not my business.

What I did understand was that there was a movement abroad for liberty from oppression and from bondage; and that the promise of such a struggle could not but dilate the honest heart with hope and excite the spirits with the taste of future felicities; and in some hours, when I heard this discussed at table loudly or in whispers by the kitchen hearth, my frame trembled with the possibility that God worked His mighty will for all of us through these unrests, and that soon, the bondage I but little understood that encompassed Bono and my mother and so many others of my acquaintance should melt away, and kindness be found in the hearts of men; and that we should then have our own soirées, and tears be put behind us, and we should, if we wished, sail back to Africa to visit those I had never known, and we would work in our own fields, in our own shops, on our own wharves; and most, that we should have final proof that the human was made in love for the operations of magnanimity and fairness, reason and excellence, and that we all, unfettered by passions, could work together for the perfection of man.