mix the great races we know apart by their color."

"Umph! An' w'at is thad something w'at tell uz that?"

"Grandfather calls it race conscience."

"Grandfather!" whimpered Ramsey, while madame asked:

"Of w'at race has Phylliz the conscien'? An' you would know Phylliz'
race--ad sight--by the color?"

"I'd know it!" put in the Kentuckian. "She's white, to all intents and
purposes."

"No," said Hugh, "not quite to all. Not to all as organized society, in
its----"

Ramsey, with eyes up the river, sighed: "Mrs. Grundy?"

"Yes, but Mrs. Grundy in her best intents and purposes."

"In her race conscience," wailed Ramsey to the breeze.

"In her race conscience," assented Hugh.

Ramsey whipped around. "Thought you had no argument."

"I'm giving grandfather's," said the grandson.

"Humph! it's yours. I'd know it at sight--by the color."

"Miss Ramsey," said the old man, toying with his cane, "Hugh and I have
been finding that, right or wrong, Mrs. Grundy or Mr. Grundy, race
conscience is a wonderful, unaccountable thing for which men will give
their life-blood by thousands." His voice failed. He waved smilingly to
Hugh.

"And when," broke in Hugh to Ramsey, "when Mrs. Grundy, in her race
conscience, says Phyllis is not white no one ought to snap his fingers
in even Mrs. Grundy's face merely to please himself or to relieve some
private situation."

Ramsey stood up, flashing first on him and then to her mother, dropped
again, and with her face in her elbow on the chair's back recited
drearily--from her third reader:

"You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
With measured beat and slow,
Like the sexton ringing the village bell
When the evening sun----"

"Ramzee!" exclaimed madame, while the old nurse groaned: "Oh, Lawd 'a'
massy!"

The girl rose, laughed, and flashed again: "Well, if Phyllis ain't white
what is she? She's got to be something!"

"Yes," said the youth, "but not everything. I know her wrongs. But none
of us, with whatever rights and wrongs, can have, or do, or be----"

"Oh, don't we know all that?" Ramsey turned to the grandfather and with
sudden deference sprang to help him rise. He faced her and the
Californian together.

"Miss Ramsey, Hugh has all your feelings in this matter."

Madame, "California," and old Joy eagerly assented.

"But poor, blundering old Mrs. Grundy, always wronging some one," the
old man smilingly continued, "is really fighting hard for