Atrocities of which the body could not have been guilty, even in thought--horrors from which it would have shrunk with the same symptoms of dismay that clouded the brow of the Northern reader at their bare relation--were rescued from the carpet-bagger dialect, and rendered into the imaginative prose of the news-reporter, with the design of securing enemies, not for the Ku-Klux movement, but the cause of Conservatism in the South. Many of these slanders never reached the individuals or communities who would have been authorized to refute them, and when their disclaimers were uttered they were either unheard or unheeded. We do not, of course, affect to say how long the evils of reconstruction were prolonged in the South by means of this influence, but there can be no doubt that it excited such a tendency, and for a long time proved the forlorn hope of the enemies of good government in this section. Many of the wise and good men who had joined the movement in its inception soon became aware of their mistake, and abandoned all connection therewith. Others followed at a later date, and about the year 1873 a general disbandment ensued, leaving only guerillas in the field. CHAPTER XIX. THE LAST OF THE K.'S. A Popular Fallacy--Karl Konstant Esq.--A Fit Companion for the Wandering Jew--Awaiting Events--The First Visitation--An Intricate Subject for the Hospitals and Doctors--Getting Even with the Latter--Put Away--Yellow Jack on a Raid--K. K. K., Esq., in his Prison Cell--Promoted to the Hospital--An Uncommon Defiance--A Picturesque Outside--Waiting for the End--K. Konstant Kain Struggles back to Shore--"Do not Weep"--A Critical Moment--A New Cast and entire Change of Scenery--"Gruel" did it--Waited upon by a Deputation of Citizens--"Young Man, Go West"--The New Orleans Pest-House--Konfounded, Krooked Konundrum. Some dealer in those cheap apothegms which commend themselves to the public gullibility, through the public tendency to moralize concerning subjects of which it knows nothing, has rendered himself famous, and the great majority of mankind asses, by the announcement that "everything must have an end." Without a design of reopening a dead controversy, or so much as mentioning the word "fossil," we must be permitted to record a belief that the author of this sage prophecy had never heard of the mathematician's war involving the crookedness of the half circle, and was grossly uninformed on the topic of the great Woman's Rights movement and those leaders who have concerned themselves about its temperature for the past two hundred years. And while the cause of orthodoxy might be safely entrusted to two such examples of "The few immortal _things_ That were not born to die,"