That period of the night equally removed from the departed and the coming day, had accomplished its fiftieth revolution, and now hung fire over the eighteenthly of the most eloquent discourse that was ever flattened out over the crowns of an equal proportion of unsuspecting listeners for the same number of times. The cries of the stricken arose from every quarter of the vast audience, and hundreds of the slain had submitted to that elongating process by which their contorted frames were made to do duty for the greatest number of "squatter sovereigns." One brother arose to testify, in a series of whoops, to the pungency of "de brudder's doctorin'," and immediately went to bed to a mass of excruciating hurts on the outskirts of the assembly. A sister, racked by the "alloverishes," and knowing the penalty for interrupting the services at this interesting stage, screamed out in affright, and reaching that point over a causeway of the best Boston built brogans, was content to embrace her toes around a neighboring sycamore. Nineteenthly stood up for duty,--arranged its cravat,--tip-toed,--and lo! instead of a chorus of grunts, a chorus of gasps, full-chested, deep drawn, and suffocating. There he stood, or rather towered, just where the rays of light fell strongest, garbed in funereal black, and full twelve feet from crown to sole.[B] Steadying himself after an awkward, but ghostlily impressive bow, there issued from that portion of his corporeal frame which might be supposed to represent the mean in a mathematical estimate of his inches, the following announcement: "I am a Ku-Klux!" and then from the upper extreme the following confirmation of this report: "I have just forded the Tallahatchie River, and am the advance guard of the old original whoopers, surnamed K. K. K.;" and then from mean and extreme, in dismal chorus, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching, etc."