war, and this great sorrow had not softened but rather hardened her nature.

Her husband's career as a preacher was now a double cross to her because it meant the doom of eternal poverty. In spite of her love for her husband and her determination with all her opposite tastes to do her duty as his wife, she could not get used to poverty. She hated it in her soul with quiet intensity.

The General was thinking of all this as he tried to frame a cheerful answer. Somehow he could not think of anything worth while to say to her. So he changed the subject.

"Mrs. Durham, I've called to ask your interest in your Sunday School in a boy who is a sort of ward of mine, young Allan McLeod."

"That handsome red-headed fellow that looks like a tiger, I've seen playing in the streets?"

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'Yes, I want you to tame him."

"Well, I will try for your sake, though he's a little older than any boy in my class. He must be over fifteen."

"Just fifteen. I'm deeply interested in him. I am going to give him a good education. His father was a drunken Scotchman in my brigade, whose loyalty to me as his chief was so genuine and touching I couldn't help loving him. He was a man of fine intellect and some culture. His trouble was drink. He never could get up in life on that account. I have an idea that he married his wife while on one of his drunks. She is from down in Robeson county, and he told me she was related to the outlaws who have infested that section for years. This boy looks like his mother, though he gets that red hair and those laughing eyes from his father. I want you to take hold of him and civilise him for me."

"I'll try, General. You know, I love boys."

"You will find him rude and boisterous at first, but I think he's got something in him.”

'I'll send for him to come to see me Saturday."

"Thank you, Madam. I must go, My love to Dr. Durham."

The next Saturday when Mrs. Durham walked into her little parlour to see Allan, the boy was scared nearly out of his wits. He sprang to his feet, stammered and blushed, and looked as though he were going to jump out of the window.

Mrs. Durham looked at him with a smile that quite disarmed his fears, took his outstretched hand, and held it trembling in hers.

"I know we will be good friends, won't we?"

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'Yessum," he stammered.

'And you won't tie any more tin cans to dogs like you did to Charlie Gaston's little terrier, will you? I like boys full of life and spirit, just so they don't do mean and cruel things."

The boy was ready to promise her anything. He was charmed with her beauty and gentle ways. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in the world.

As they started toward the door, she gently slipped one arm around him, put her hand under his chin and kissed him.

Then he was ready to die for her. It was the first kiss he had ever received from a woman's lips. His mother was not a demonstrative woman, He never recalled a kiss she had given him. His blood tingled with the delicious sense of this one's sweetness. All the afternoon he sat out under a tree and dreamed and watched the house where this wonderful thing had happened to him.

I

CHAPTER XI

SIMON LEGREE

N the death of Mr. Lincoln, a group of radical politicians, hitherto suppressed, saw their supreme opportunity to obtain control of the nation in the crisis of an approaching Presidential campaign.

Now they could fasten their schemes of proscription, confiscation, and revenge upon the South.

Mr. Lincoln had held these wolves at bay during his life by the power of his great personality. But the Lion was dead, and the Wolf, who had snarled and snapped at him in life, put on his skin and claimed the heritage of his power. The Wolf whispered his message of hate, and in the hour of partisan passion became the master of the nation.

Busy feet had been hurrying back and forth from the Southern states to Washington whispering in the Wolf's ear the stories of sure success, if only the plan of proscription, disfranchisement of whites, and enfranchisement of blacks were carried out.

This movement was inaugurated two years after the war, with every Southern state in profound peace, and in a life and death struggle with nature to prevent famine. The new revolution destroyed the Union a second time, paralysed every industry in the South, and transformed ten peaceful states into roaring hells of anarchy. We have easily outlived the sorrows of the war. That was a surgery which healed the body. But the

child has not yet been born whose children's children will live to see the healing of the wounds from those four years of chaos, when fanatics blinded by passion, armed millions of ignorant negroes and thrust them into mortal combat with the proud, bleeding, halfstarving Anglo-Saxon race of the South. Such a deed once done, can never be undone. It fixes the status of these races for a thousand years, if not for eternity.

The South was now rapidly gathering into two hostile armies under these influences, with race marks as uniforms the Black against the White.

The Negro army was under the command of a triumvirate, the Carpet-bagger from the North, the native Scalawag and the Negro Demagogue.

Entirely distinct from either of these was the genuine Yankee soldier settler in the South after the war, who came because he loved its genial skies and kindly people.

Ultimately some of these Northern settlers were forced into politics by conditions around them, and they constituted the only conscience and brains visible in public life during the reign of terror which the "Reconstruction" régime inaugurated.

In the winter of 1866 the Union League at Hambright held a meeting of special importance. The attendance was large and enthusiastic.

Amos Hogg, the defeated candidate for Governor in the last election, now the President of the Federation of "Loyal Leagues," had sent a special ambassador to this meeting to receive reports and give instructions.

This ambassador was none other than the famous Simon Legree of Red River, who had migrated to North Carolina attracted by the first proclamation of the President, announcing his plan for readmitting the state to the Union. The rumours of his death proved a mistake. He had quit drink, and set his mind on greater vices.

In his face were the features of the distinguished ruffian whose cruelty to his slaves had made him unique in infamy in the annals of the South. He was now preeminently the type of the "truly loyal". At the first rumour of war he had sold his negroes and migrated nearer the border land, that he might the better avoid service in either army. He succeeded in doing this. The last two years of the war, however, the enlisting officers pressed him hard, until finally he hit on a brilliant scheme.

He shaved clean, and dressed as a German emigrant ( woman. He wore dresses for two years, did house work, milked the cows and cut wood for a good natured old German. He paid for his board, and passed for a sister, just from the old country.

When the war closed, he resumed male attire, became a violent Union man, and swore that he had been hounded and persecuted without mercy by the Secessionist rebels.

He was looking more at ease now than ever in his life. He wore a silk hat and a new suit of clothes made by a fashionable tailor in Raleigh. He was a little older looking than when he killed Uncle Tom on his farm some ten years before, but otherwise unchanged. He had the same short muscular body, round bullet head, light grey eyes and shaggy eyebrows, but his deep chestnut bristly hair had been trimmed by a barber. His coarse thick lips drooped at the corners of his mouth and emphasised the crook in his nose. His eyes, well set apart, as of old, were bold, commanding, and flashed with the cold light of glittering steel. His teeth that once were pointed like the fangs of a wolf had been filed by a dentist. But it required more than the file of a dentist to smooth out of that face the ferocity and cruelty that years of dissolute habits had fixed.

He was only forty-two years old, but the flabby flesh