Miss No'th?"

She lifted him from the floor.

"No--I won't let him," and she put him gently into his seat.

Still, with hushed faces, the children gazed wonderingly.... She held
out her arms.

"Come, Ezekiel!" Was Miss North going to cry?

"Sit down--right here, Ezekiel; you are very--tired!"

He still hung over the desk, and she went up to him between the seats.

"Eze-kiel! Come! Come--my dear little boy!"

But there was the sound of an opening door, and she turned.

In the doorway stood a large and ancient-looking colored man, and for
a moment he only stood there, breathing laboriously and murmuring in
strange, half-audible tones. Then, with sudden unexpected perception,
he took in the scene before him. Half mortified, half conciliatory, he
turned to Miss North.

"Jes all completely wrop in dey edjercation!" he explained
ingratiatingly, with resigned indulgence. His eyes rested on Trusty.

"Cert'nly did use ter be de boss o' dat boy! Cert'nly did!" He looked
at Ezekiel and chuckled indulgently. "But look like times is change!
Cert'nly is change! Ya-as, suh, I jes natchelly pass de case over ter
you!"

He turned around and went out again--and Ezekiel looked up at Miss
North through his tears.

[Illustration]

FIRST DAYS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

BY

CARL SCHURZ

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

My travels in the interior of the South in the summer and fall of 1865
took me over the track of Sherman's march, which, in South Carolina at
least, looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and
desolation--fences gone, lonesome smoke-stacks, surrounded by dark
heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations
had stood, the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with
here and there a sickly-looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by
negro squatters. In the city of Columbia, the political capital of the
State, I found a thin fringe of houses encircling a confused mass of
charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings which had been
destroyed by a sweeping conflagration.

No part of the South I then visited had, indeed, suffered as much from
the ravages of the war as South Carolina--the State which was looked
upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator of the whole
mischief and therefore deserving of special punishment. But even those
regions which had been touched but little or not at all by military
operations were laboring under dire d