the Mount of Olives, can
men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. The seed which the
colonel sowed seemed to fall by the wayside, it is true; but other
eyes have seen with the same light, and while Fetters and his kind
still dominate their section, other hands have taken up the fight
which the colonel dropped. In manufactures the South has gone forward
by leaps and bounds. The strong arm of the Government, guided by a
wise and just executive, has been reached out to crush the poisonous
growth of peonage, and men hitherto silent have raised their voices to
commend. Here and there a brave judge has condemned the infamy of the
chain-gang and convict lease systems. Good men, North and South, have
banded themselves together to promote the cause of popular education.
Slowly, like all great social changes, but visibly, to the eye of
faith, is growing up a new body of thought, favourable to just laws
and their orderly administration. In this changed attitude of mind
lies the hope of the future, the hope of the Republic.

But Clarendon has had its chance, nor seems yet to have had another.
Other towns, some not far from it, lying nearer the main lines of
travel, have been swept into the current of modern life, but not yet
Clarendon. There the grass grows thicker in the streets. The
meditative cows still graze in the vacant lot between the post-office
and the bank, where the public library was to stand. The old academy
has grown more dilapidated than ever, and a large section of plaster
has fallen from the wall, carrying with it the pencil drawing made in
the colonel's schooldays; and if Miss Laura Treadwell sees that the
graves of the old Frenches are not allowed to grow up in weeds and
grass, the colonel knows nothing of it. The pigs and the
loafers--leaner pigs and lazier loafers--still sleep in the shade,
when the pound keeper and the constable are not active. The limpid
water of the creek still murmurs down the slope and ripples over the
stone foundation of what was to have been the new dam, while the birds
have nested for some years in the vines that soon overgrew the
unfinished walls of the colonel's cotton mill. White men go their way,
and black men theirs, and these ways grow wider apart, and no one
knows the outcome. But there are those who hope, and those who pray,
that this condition will pass, that some day our whole land will be
truly free, and the strong will cheerfully help to bear the burdens of
the wea