rom the small villages and country
districts of the South up to the cities, where they cannot battle with
the terrible force of a strange and unusual environment? Is there no way
to prove to them that woollen-shirted, brown-jeaned simplicity is
infinitely better than broad-clothed degradation?" They wanted to
preach to these people that good agriculture is better than bad
art,--that it was better and nobler for them to sing to God across the
Southern fields than to dance for rowdies in the Northern halls. They
wanted to dare to say that the South has its faults--no one condones
them--and its disadvantages, but that even what they suffered from these
was better than what awaited them in the great alleys of New York. Down
there, the bodies were restrained, and they chafed; but here the soul
would fester, and they would be content.

This was but for an hour, for even while they exclaimed they knew that
there was no way, and that the stream of young negro life would continue
to flow up from the South, dashing itself against the hard necessities
of the city and breaking like waves against a rock,--that, until the
gods grew tired of their cruel sport, there must still be sacrifices to
false ideals and unreal ambitions.

There was one heart, though, that neither dismissed Joe with gratuitous
pity nor sermonised about him. The mother heart had only room for grief
and pain. Already it had borne its share. It had known sorrow for a lost
husband, tears at the neglect and brutality of a new companion, shame
for a daughter's sake, and it had seemed already filled to overflowing.
And yet the fates had put in this one other burden until it seemed it
must burst with the weight of it.

To Fannie Hamilton's mind now all her boy's shortcomings became as
naught. He was not her wayward, erring, criminal son. She only
remembered that he was her son, and wept for him as such. She forgot his
curses, while her memory went back to the sweetness of his baby prattle
and the soft words of his tenderer youth. Until the last she clung to
him, holding him guiltless, and to her thought they took to prison, not
Joe Hamilton, a convicted criminal, but Joey, Joey, her boy, her
firstborn,--a martyr.

The pretty Miss Kitty Hamilton was less deeply impressed. The arrest
and subsequent conviction of her brother was quite a blow. She felt the
shame of it keenly, and some of the grief. To her, coming as it did just
at a time when the company was being stren