the white children; how they sat by white people in the churches
and theatres, ate with them in the public restaurants, and buried their
dead in the same cemeteries. The professor waxed eloquent with the
development of his theme, and, as a finishing touch to an alluring
picture, assured the excited audience that the intermarriage of the
races was common, and that he himself had espoused a white woman.

Uncle Wellington Braboy was a deeply interested listener. He had heard
something of these facts before, but his information had always come in
such vague and questionable shape that he had paid little attention to
it. He knew that the Yankees had freed the slaves, and that runaway
negroes had always gone to the North to seek liberty; any such equality,
however, as the visiting brother had depicted, was more than uncle
Wellington had ever conceived as actually existing anywhere in the
world. At first he felt inclined to doubt the truth of the speaker's
statements; but the cut of his clothes, the eloquence of his language,
and the flowing length of his whiskers, were so far superior to anything
uncle Wellington had ever met among the colored people of his native
State, that he felt irresistibly impelled to the conviction that nothing
less than the advantages claimed for the North by the visiting brother
could have produced such an exquisite flower of civilization. Any
lingering doubts uncle Wellington may have felt were entirely dispelled
by the courtly bow and cordial grasp of the hand with which the visiting
brother acknowledged the congratulations showered upon him by the
audience at the close of his address.

The more uncle Wellington's mind dwelt upon the professor's speech, the
more attractive seemed the picture of Northern life presented. Uncle
Wellington possessed in large measure the imaginative faculty so freely
bestowed by nature upon the race from which the darker half of his blood
was drawn. He had indulged in occasional day-dreams of an ideal state of
social equality, but his wildest flights of fancy had never located it
nearer than heaven, and he had felt some misgivings about its practical
working even there. Its desirability he had never doubted, and the
speech of the evening before had given a local habitation and a name to
the forms his imagination had bodied forth. Giving full rein to his
fancy, he saw in the North a land flowing with milk and honey,--a land
peopled by noble men and beautiful women, amon