To say, notwithstanding, the beautiful start he made, and the high dramatic turn he was giving the events of his narrative up to the fatal moment of collapse, that this witness's testimony went absolutely for nothing, and that his explanation, tendered at some length and supported by all those texts of mill-boy verity which had been successfully adduced by his rivals respectively, was rejected by an indignant auditory, is to anticipate the reader. When, at length, the mill-wheel had performed its last revolution, and the mill boys, astride their sacks of flour, dispersed to their homes, it was with the solemn conviction that some great mystery had dawned upon their young lives, to whose after developments they must look for that rational sequel which had thus far been denied them. Hundreds there were in this and other localities of the South who, while they rejected the idea of a Ku-Klux phantom, were equally slow in accepting the current theories which dissociated them and their plans from all preternatural agencies. In every man's breast there is more or less of that mysterious element which, under proper conditions of time and place, sees ghosts in shadows, and hears them in the faintest echo. These attributes (if the term be admissible) implanted in the breast of the child at its birth, though weeded with ever so careful a hand during the years of training, still retain some tendril hold, which no process of metaphysics can uproot, and which in the future years send out fruit-bearing branches that make and unmake human destiny. Of the majority of human kind, it may be said that their lives and possible achievements are covered under a great incubus of superstitious thought and feeling. And if, at some late period of existence they take the tide at a favorable turn and struggle up into the pure surroundings of an honest life, the effort frequently comes too late, for they see in this change only some postponed dispensation of _luck_ in their favor, and so are worse bondmen than before. Some men there are who will even confess to you that they are governed by these strange impulses in what they term the "trifling details of life," but as men who admit "trifling details" into their lives rarely attain to a higher life than is constituted by the sum of these, their admission covers a greater scope than they probably intended. Others, equally candid, adopt a different mode of imparting the same confidence, and naively tell you that in "the more _important_ concerns of life" they are indebted for guidance to an unseen agency. But as these men wholly mistake the meaning of the adjective they use, adjusting it to such retail considerations as flow from their daily business or dwell at the bottom of their post-prandial cup, we must take their confession to include both froth and sediment, the top and bottom of so many human lives.