The regular Ku Klux costume was a white gown or sheet, and a tall, conical pasteboard hat; for the horse a white sheet and foot-mufflers. Black gown, mask and trappings, and red ones, were also worn; bones, skulls of men and beasts, with foxfire for eyes, nose and mouth, were expedients. A rubber tube underneath robe or sheet, or a rubber or leather bag, provided for miraculous consumption of water. In negro tales of supernatural appearances, latitude must be allowed for imagination. A Ku Klux captain tells me that one night as he rose up out of a graveyard, one of his negroes passed with a purloined gobbler in possession; he touched the negro on the shoulder. The negro dropped the turkey and flew like mad, and the turkey flew, too. Next morning, the darkey related the experience to his master (omitting the fowl). "How tall was that hant, George?" "Des high ez a tree, Marster! an' de han' it toch my shoulder wid burnt me lak fire. I got mutton-suet on de place." "I was about three feet taller than my natural self that night," says Captain Lea. George wore a plaster on his arm and for some time complained that it was "pa'lised." Klans and Union Leagues came to an end conjointly when carpet-bag rule was expiring. The Invisible Empire was dissolved formally by order of the Grand Wizard, March, 1869. It had never been a close organisation, and "dens" and counterfeit "dens" continued in existence here and there for awhile, working good and evil. Ku Klux investigations instituted by State authorities and the Federal Government were travesties of justice. Rewards offered for evidence to convict caused innocent men to be hunted down, arrested, imprisoned, and on false accusation and suborned testimony, convicted and committed to State prisons or sent to Sing Sing. The jails of Columbia, at one time, overflowed with the first gentlemen of the state, thrown into filthy cells, charged with all manner of crimes. The Union League incited to murder and arson, whipped negroes and whites. But I never heard of Union Leaguers being tried for being Union Leaguers as Ku Klux were tried for being Ku Klux. There are no Southerners to contend that the Klan and its measures were justifiable or excusable except on the grounds that the conditions of the times called for them; informed Northerners will concede that the evils of the day justified or excused the Klan's existence. For my part, I believe that this country owes a heavy debt to its noiseless white horsemen, shades of its troubled past.[21] THE SOUTHERN BALLOT-BOX CHAPTER XXV THE SOUTHERN BALLOT-BOX