mon answered for both. In touching words, the
rector, a man of culture, taste and feeling, and a faithful servant of
his Master, spoke of the sweet young life brought to so untimely an
end, and pointed the bereaved father to the best source of
consolation. He paid a brief tribute to the faithful servant and
humble friend, to whom, though black and lowly, the white people of
the town were glad to pay this signal tribute of respect and
appreciation for his heroic deed. The attendance at the funeral, while
it might have been larger, was composed of the more refined and
cultured of the townspeople, from whom, indeed, the church derived
most of its membership and support; and the gallery overflowed with
coloured people, whose hearts had warmed to the great honour thus paid
to one of their race. Four young white men bore Phil's body and the
six pallbearers of old Peter were from among the best white people of
the town.

The double interment was made in Oak Cemetery. Simultaneously both
bodies were lowered to their last resting-place. Simultaneously ashes
were consigned to ashes and dust to dust. The earth was heaped above
the graves. The mound above little Phil's was buried with flowers, and
old Peter's was not neglected.

Beyond the cemetery wall, a few white men of the commoner sort watched
the proceedings from a distance, and eyed with grim hostility the
Negroes who had followed the procession. They had no part nor parcel
in this sentimental folly, nor did they approve of it--in fact they
disapproved of it very decidedly. Among them was the colonel's
discharged foreman, Jim Green, who was pronounced in his denunciation.

"Colonel French is an enemy of his race," he declared to his
sympathetic following. "He hires niggers when white men are idle; and
pays them more than white men who work are earning. And now he is
burying them with white people."

When the group around the grave began to disperse, the little knot of
disgruntled spectators moved sullenly away. In the evening they might
have been seen, most of them, around Clay Jackson's barroom. Turner,
the foreman at Fetters's convict farm, was in town that evening, and
Jackson's was his favourite haunt. For some reason Turner was more
sociable than usual, and liquor flowed freely, at his expense. There
was a great deal of intemperate talk, concerning the Negro in jail for
shooting Haines and young Fetters, and concerning Colonel French as
the protector of Negroes and