The procession kept on. Growing and still growing, it kept on. By now you might have counted in its ranks fit representatives of every grade and class, every cult and every creed to be found in the male population of our town. Old men and young men marched; bachelors and heads of families; rich men and poor; men who made public sentiment and men who defied it; strict churchgoers and avowed sceptics; men called good and men called bad. You might have ticked off almost any kind of man in that line. Possibly the Pharisees were missing and the Scribes were served only in the person of the editor of the _Daily Evening News_, who appeared well up toward the front of one of the files, with a forgotten cedar lead pencil riding in the crotch of his right ear. But assuredly the Publican was there and the Sinner. Heralded by the sound of its own thumping tread and leaving in its wake a stupefaction of astonishment, the procession kept straight on down Franklin Street, through the clear October sunshine and under the sentinel maples, which sifted down gentle showers of red and yellow leaves upon it. It kept on until it reached the very foot of the street. There it swung off at right angles into a dingy, ill-kempt little street that coursed crookedly along the water front, with poor houses rising upon one side and the raw mud banks of the river falling steeply away upon the other. It followed this street until the head of it came opposite a little squat box-and-barn of a structure, built out of up-and-down planking; unpainted, too, with a slatted belfry, like an overgrown chicken coop, perched midway of the peak of its steeply pitched tin roof. Now this structure, as all knew who remembered the history of contemporary litigation as recorded in the local prints, was the True Believers' Afro-American Church of Zion, sometimes termed in derision Possum Trot, being until recently the place of worship of that newest and most turbulent of local negro sects, but now closed on an injunction secured by one of the warring factions within its membership and temporarily lodged in the custody of the circuit court and in the hands of that court's servant, the high sheriff, pending ultimate determination of the issue by his honour, the circuit judge. Technically it was still closed; legally and officially still in the firm grasp of Sheriff Giles Birdsong. Actually and physically it was at this moment open--wide open. The double doors were drawn back, the windows shone clean, and at the threshold of the swept and garnished interior stood Judge Priest's Jeff, with his broom in his hand and his mop and bucket at his side. Jeff had concluded his share of the labours barely in time.