resigned by the white settlers of Crow
Hide to the slave population of the township in _ante bellum_ times, and
the title to which, in obedience to a policy of non-interference on the
part of lawful claimants, had survived to their descendants in the golden
era of freedom. This building performed innumerable offices for the
foundlings of emancipation in those parts--marriages, funerals, revival
meetings, society gatherings, etc., occupying it in turn, and even once in
a while the dark-lantern fiend invading its precincts. From its sacred
desk, battered with age and apostolic blows, and warped by the sunbeams of
three generations, the venerable "parson" was wont to deliver castigations
to the erring of his people on holy days, and anon, to receive from the
High Tycoon of the League--enthroned on the same heights--the most bitter
denunciations of his political shortcomings. Here, the firstlings of the
flock were dedicated to the higher life of Christian rectitude in the holy
rite of baptism. And here, too, the candidate for political preferment was
made to feel the responsibilities of the step by being dipped seven times
in the "witches' cauldron" ere he was referred for those special services
which constitute the "heated gridiron," the most beautifully suggestive of
the ritualistic conditions of League membership. Here sisters and
brothers, giving way to their better instincts, harmonized on meeting
days; and here, brothers and sisters, with a broader display of those
principles which govern human nature--if with less consistency--refused to
harmonize on League days. Here, shouting and singing constituted the
mercurial forces "jurin de roasen 'ere and kant meetin'" solstice, and
here (_in hoc signo_) broken heads and scattered fragments of benches
marked the political temperature, when the League machine held right on
its course, over those sensitive members of the brotherhood, which it
might not be proper to denominate "sore tails" without this
circumlocution.

It was on this spot, and amid these venerable surroundings,
contemporaneously with the Ku-Klux demonstration to which attention has
been directed, that a scene was enacted which fills an excruciating
passage in our narrative, and which we have only been debarred from
presenting to the reader by the obtrusion of details which could not be
excerpted from the latter without injuring its consistency.

To say that the L. L. was in full bloom, and moving unflinchingly