sterious way which was a feature of the troublous
times, both were recognized targets for other missiles than stones
flung by dimpled baby hands.

* * * * *

It was an educating period for small maids of six, that long-ago time
of bitter party hatred. Though only a short half-dozen years crowned
her fair cropped head, and she lisped still in an adorable baby way,
Hope Carolina was very wise--"monstrous wise," the black people said.
She did not understand the meaning of "renegade" exactly,--the Radical
Judge was a renegade too,--but she knew all about Reconstruction. It
was what made _them_, the black people, so sassy, and your own darling
family wretched.

[Illustration: "'WADICAL!'"]

She knew, too, that Radical judges always wore chain shirts under
their white ones, because they were afraid; and that they carried
knives, oh, mighty big ones, forever up their sleeves, to show in
bar-rooms sometimes to Uncle John when anybody talked too loudly of
renegades and turn-coats. Then, too, and worst of all, they got rich
in a single night and took beautiful homes from dear Prestons and
lived in them themselves. The beloved Prestons, so nobly proud in
their fallen fortunes,--so right and proper in their politics,--had
once owned all the lovely grounds alongside the bald yard that
inclosed the child's own hired house; grounds where peacocks were as
much at home as in story-books--peacocks with tails more ravishing
than fly-brushes; where magnolia-trees flung down big scented petals
as fascinating as sheets of letter-paper, and tall poplars stood like
angels with half-closed wings against the sky. And with her own
tear-filled eyes Hope Carolina had seen the exiled ones depart from
this paradise crying, ah, so bitterly; turning back, as the breaking
heart turns, for long, last, kissing looks. And now the Radical Judge
lived there--the bad Radical Judge _who went locked-arms with
niggers_; lived there with the wife who took things to forget, and the
little crippled child who had never walked in her life because
somebody had let her fall long ago.

[Illustration: "AN UNTIDY MIDGET FOLLOWING CLOSELY AT HIS HEELS"]

Hope Carolina could never go over again and make brown writing marks
on the sweet magnolia petals. She could never steal suddenly through
the boxwood hedge which hid the paling fence at that side of the hired
yard, and frighten the peacocks so that they would spread their tails
proudl