And then he went on and told me the hull story, and mebby I’d better tell it a little faster than he did. It took place some years before, but he had lived right there in Eden Centre, and wuz knowin’ to the hull thing. A white minister had come down from the North, a man who had some property, and wuz a good man, and seein’ the grievous need of schools for the black man, had used his own money to build the academy. He tried to get land for the school nearer the city, where more could be helped by it, but nobody would sell land for such a purpose. Finally, he come here, and on this poor tract of land that the negroes owned he put up his buildings. It took about all the money he had to build the house and get the school started. He had jest got it started, and had fifty pupils—grown people and children of the freedmen—when some ruffians come one stormy night and set it on fire. The white prejudice wuz so strong aginst havin’ the colored race taught, that they burned down the buildings, destroyed all the property that that good man had spent there. It wuz on a cold, stormy night. His wife wuz ill in bed when the fire broke out; the fright and exposure of that night killed her. Not a white man dast open his door to take the family in, though the white Baptist preacher at Wyandotte, when he hearn on it, he jest riz right up in his pulpit the next Sunday night, mad with a holy wrath at what had been done in their midst. He riz right up and told his flock right to their faces what he thought of such doin’s. They said he stood there with his handsome head throwed back, and sez he, brave as a lion (and fur better-lookin’), sez he: “Such outrages are a shame to humanity. Men war against principles and issues, not against helpless women and children;” and sez he, “If they had fled to me for safety, I would have opened my doors and taken them in.” Oh, how they glared at him, and how the threatenin’, scowlin’ faces seemed to close round him, and his wife’s heart almost stopped beatin’; she could fairly hear the report of the pistol-shot and feel the sharp knife of the assassin. When all to once his little girl, only three years old, who had come to church that night, she see the black looks and heard the muttered threats aginst her papa. And she slipped down unnoticed and come up to him, and pressed up close aginst him, and tried to creep up into his arms as if she wanted to protect him, the pretty creeter. He sez, “Hush, darling, you mustn’t come to papa.” But she wouldn’t go; she made him take her up in his arms, and from that safe refuge she shook her tiny fist at the crowd, and cries out: “You just let my papa be; you shan’t hurt my good papa.” Wall, the tears jest run down that preacher’s face, he wuz that wrought up with divine fervor and principles before, and this capped the sheef.