member of the order would assist one under the ban of its displeasure; but I repeat that no such men as yourself are in that situation. When such creatures as Swazey can find entrance into it, much less to manage it, I and all other gentlemen will retire. Thus far its influence has in my opinion been not only good, but its existence a vital necessity to the white people of the South-the female portion in particular. You would join it yourself with me if it were properly presented.

"To outrages of the kind that occurred by mistake last night all decent men are opposed. You need apprehend no personal violence. I pledge my word to that. I think on your mother's account it were best you should both come to town for a few weeks and I will telegraph to Chattanooga for Dr. Givens to run over and examine her. Please express my utter condemnation of the whole affair," seeing Moran rise and take his hat, "to your mother when she is able to converse about it," said Colonel Foley.

"Are you through, sir?" said that gentleman; “if so, permit me to say that in regard to the information you have given me I shall of course respect the means by which you obtained it. Your offer of protection I hope I duly appreciate. When I need it for myself or my mother I shall ask for it. When I ask for it I request you to cowhide me on the spot. I thank you for mentioning Dr. Givens's name. I can telegraph him, if mother requires it. If we should come to town at all, I beg you to believe it is neither for your own nor any other person's protection. I bid you good afternoon." And Mr. Moran was out of the door before Mrs. Foley and Miss Laura could get into the sittingroom to learn "what in the world dear papa and Mr. Moran were talking so loud about."

532414B

CHAPTER XI.

K. K. THAT WERE NOT GENTLEMEN.

When Moran reached Ravenscroft at twilight of the same day, old Jim the house servant met him at the yard gate and narrated about what is already known-that his dear mother was bed-ridden from the nervous shock of the night before, that Dr. and Mrs. Roberts were then with her, that her enquiries for Archie were constant, that he, Jim, was "so glad Mas' Archie was away" (the habits of slavery still clung to Jim, and his lips were unused to Mr.), and that a whole rigiment of Ku Klux had been at the old place the night before.

At the precise moment the negro closed his account Mr. Archibald Moran was without doubt as extreme a Radical in his feelings as lived at that time south of the Potomac.

He felt towards his neighbors all the fierce fury of Zach Chandler or Mr. Thaddeus Stevens. He inwardly resolved to sacrifice himself and his property if nothing less would arouse the law to action. No measure appeared too violent to his hot imagination, and he actually counselled with Jim in regard to the destruction of Dunham by negro incendiaries, if another raid of Ku Klux was made in the county. The negro, like all of his race in the South, had shouted with joy upon hearing of every accession to the Republican ranks from the late slaveholding class. There was nothing he or they would not have done under the direction of that class—the reconstructed Republican ex-slave-holders. Over Archie's conversion to the good cause Jim had almost felt the elevation of aged Simeon.

Moran believed (foolish fellow that he was) that the whole county of Dunham was in league against him and as determined to crush out the heresy of his opinions as the old church was to suppress Luther. There was united effort, he imag

ined, to choke down every man who dared to exercise the Godgiven rights of free thought and free speech.

It was a long time after this that he came to think the people of his State right in certain extreme views, which they entertained at the time he and Jim were talking about burning Dunham to the ground.

The people whom he was now execrating had concluded to be rid of their thieves in high place, cost what it might. The thieves were known to be cowards and their fears were worked upon till they fled the country. Here and there a God and morality man, who was bringing up the passions of a vast black horde of ignorant men to support the government of the thieves, was soundly threshed with hickory withes, and given a certain number of days in which to go North and report the failure of his plan to Christianize and civilize the South. It was long after this that he read in Burke's splendid pages this exact description of his people's feelings in reply to the kind promises of the North to convert and enlighten them:

"We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. We have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals.

"We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man.

"We preserve the whole of our feelings, still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms."

It was a long while after this that he read these noble lines

along with the prose of Milton and the masterly Macaulay. He then took account of many indices which now escaped him. The wrath of a whole people became a solemn, grand thought. Now it provoked him as a vendetta would have done. Selfish then to a degree which afterwards writhed him, he imagined himself patriotic, and was proud to be stuffed with those “ blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man.”

"paltry

He was unconsciously glorifying himself on being connected with that school of Northern plutocrats themselves the most careful to avoid poor people, which the mass of mankind must ever be who are forever prating about equality among mena dogma which has not in France alone, but everywhere, as its corollary, the equality of man with any other, even the highest type, which plain people call God. This is the more certain to happen when that God is presented for acceptation in the likeness of flesh. We are all equal, they first say. It soon comes about that we are all equally the highest of beings— concluded developments. It is a poor Maker who has but one model. If men are turned out from the heavenly moulds with the uniformity of spools from a machine, what is the necessity to our complete mental satisfaction with such a system, of any other supplying data except what Mr. Herbert Spencer's Force can furnish. It is perhaps a mere incident that Beecher and Ingersoll and Mr. Lincoln (if his trusted friends are to be believed) and others high in Republican politics are or have been disposed to investigate the enigmas which puzzled Paul, without asking as Paul did for assistance outside of themselves. This basis is, of course, not wide enough to build the conclusion at which analogy clutches. Even if the statistics were furnished us accurately showing that where these equal rights theories are most thoroughly graffed in the warp and woof of every-day life, there Orthodox Christianity as understood in the Sermon on the Mount does least obtain, and is most obnoxious to objection, it would scarcely be enough. That the figures would show this one can hardly doubt (of a whole colony of West

Massachusetts settlers in Ravenscroft neighborhood, the very

nearest approach to Christianity is one family of Unitarians, who take Christ with a query-all the rest deny hell out and out)-I say if the figures fitted, I don't know that they would prove all they would appear to prove. The opposition might say, as they said when France went mad a hundred years ago, that they went mad because they were Frenchmen, and not because they were infidels, and before we could catch our breath they would have us on the hip with the debt all Americans owed to those very free-thinkers, Franklin, Jefferson and the whole school of our early Gallic worshippers-winding up with the observation that Washington was a common man, a man of fair sense and much prudence, but after all a common man-in fact no such man as Grant.

So that with these knock-down arguments, you and I would be compelled, as Archie long afterwards was, to give it up and fall back on inequality, as the rule of God speaking through nature everywhere-in the shark of the sea, or the pike of the mill-pond, in the lion and the hyena, in elephants and rats, in Stonewall Jackson and General Nathaniel P. Banks, of Massachusetts, in white men and negroes, between the Foleys and the Maloneys, with whom this chapter set out to be occupied, and from whom it begs a great deal of pardon for the thus far evident neglect.

There are certain scenes in domestic life which one does not permit even friends to look upon, and the same sense ought to follow us in making books. Why call up the changes in a sweet matronly face made by one night's work of hell? Why tell that in the race between the silver and the auburn of that pretty round Greek head, the silver was past the third quarter's stretch-having gained so much in the one week of the young man's absence?

Why compare and contrast her present, either with her own former modes, or the modes she was so soon to wear, reft of her clay and made all pure? We will do as Dr. and Mrs. Roberts did-we will leave the room as Archie enters. We can hear as they did from the hallway, the invocation to heaven, the