“How can we tell, and how dast we say that a evil that affects one class of humanity can never reach us—how do we know it won’t?” “Because we do know it!” hollered Josiah. “I know it is jest as I tell you, that that dumb nigger question can’t never touch us anyway. I’ve said it, and I’ll stick to it.” But I still felt real eloquent, and I went right on and drew some metafors, as I most always do when I get to goin’, I can’t seem to help it. Sez I, “The temperate man may say the liquor question will never affect him, but some day he gathers his sober children about him, and finds one is missin’—the pet of them all driven down in the street to death by a drunken driver. “A Christian woman sez, ‘This question of Social Purity cannot affect me, for I am pure and come from a pure ancestry.’ But there comes a day when she finds the lamb of her flock overtaken and slain by this evil she thought could never touch her. “The rich capitalist sets back in his luxurious chair and reads of the grim want that is howlin’ about the hovels of the poor laborers, the deaths by exposure and starvation. The graves of these starved victims seem fur off to him. They can never affect him, he thinks, so fur is he removed in his luxurious surroundin’s from all sights of woe and squalor. “But even as he sets there thinkin’ this, in his curtained ease, a bullet aimed by the gaunt, frenzied hand of some starvin’ child of labor strikes his heart, and he finds in death the same level that the victims of want found by starvation. “The mighty chain of humanity has drawn ’em on together, the high and the low, down to the equality of the grave. “The hull chain of humanity is held in one hand anyway, and is beyend our control in its consequences. “And how dast we to say with blind confidence that we know thus and so; that the evils that affect our brothers will not some time come to us; that the shadows that lay so heavy on their heads will not some time fall on us?” “They hain’t our brothers,” hollered out Josiah in fearful axents. He wuzn’t melted down at all by my eloquent remarks; no, fur from it. “They hain’t my brothers, and I know these dumb doin’s in the South won’t affect us, nor can’t, and you can’t make it,” sez he. The idee of my wantin’ to! But that is the nater of men—wantin’ to say sunthin’ to kinder blame a female. And truly he acted mad as a hen to think I should venter to talk back, or even speak on the subject. Oh, short-sighted man that he wuz—when the darkness wuz even then gatherin’ in the distance onbeknown to us, to take the shape of the big shadow that wuz to fall on his poor old heart and mine—the shadow reachin’ from the Southern sky even unto the North, and that would blot out all the sunshine for us for many and many a weary day, and that we must set down under for all the rest of our lives! But I am a eppisodin’. [Illustration: MELINDA.] CHAPTER III.