his
registration as an Afro-American voter, the announcement had never
failed to evoke a smile, accompanied many times by good-humored
pleasantry.

"Well, sir," so he had often laughed, "I reck'n dey must o' gimme de
name o' White fur a joke. But de Jordan--I don' know, less'n dey named
me Jordan 'caze ev'ybody was afeerd ter cross me."

From which it seems that the surname was not an inheritance.

In his clerical suit of black, with standing collar and shirt-front
matched in fairness only by his marvellously white teeth and eyeballs,
Jordan was a most interesting study in black and white.

There were no intermediate shades about him. Even his lips were black,
or of so dark a purple as to fail to maintain an outline of color. They
looked black, too.

Jordan was essentially ugly, too, with that peculiar genius for ugliness
which must have inspired the familiar saying current among plantation
folk, "He's so ogly tell he's purty."

There is a certain homeliness of person, a combined result of type and
degree, which undeniably possesses a peculiar charm, fascinating the eye
more than confessed beauty of a lesser degree or more conventional form.

Jordan was ugly in this fashion, and he who glanced casually upon his
ebony countenance rarely failed to look again.

He was a genius, too, in more ways than one.

If nature gave him two startling eyes that moved independently of each
other, Jordan made the most of the fact, as will be seen by the
following confession made on the occasion of my questioning him as to
the secret of his success as a preacher.

"Well, sir," he replied, "yer see, to begin wid: I got three glances,
an' dat gimme three shots wid ev'y argimint.

"When I'm a preachin' I looks straight at one man an' lays his case out
so clair he can't miss it, but, you see, all de time I'm a-layin' him
out, my side glances is takin' in two mo'."

"But," I protested, "I should think he whom you are looking at and
describing in so personal a manner would get angry, and--"

"So he would, sir, if he knowed I was lookin' at him. _But he don't
know it_. You know, dat's my third glance an' hit's my secret glance.
You see, if my reel glance went straight, I'd have ter do like de rest
o' you preachers, look at one man while yer hittin' de man behin' 'im,
an' dat's de way dey _think I is doin_', whiles all de time I'm a
watchin' 'im wriggle.

"Of cose, sometimes I uses my glances diff'ent ways. Sometimes I des
lets