When her own heart was burdened by sorrow, she sang out of its fullness and pathos to the negro, and the tears glided out of his eyes and ran down into the deep-cut furrows of his black face. The old negro discovered in the experience of the few eventful years that there was nothing hopeful or helpful in the pledges or proclamations of the reconstructionists. The very old negroes were not counted in the aggregation of their numerical power, or in the sum total of the freedmen. "Old Glory" never welcomed them with a dip of its proud crest as they passed in and out of the town in tatters and rags. It never bade them with its caress to pause within its grateful shadow in the dog days when they were over wearied with marching and counter-marching. The great Commissariat persistently withheld its bounty when there was no election--no votes to be polled for Laflin and his pampered minions. These dilapidated creatures were post-prandial guests in the banqueting halls of the bosses; hounds rather to gnaw the bones that were flung as offal upon the refuse heaps. They were not the artisans who were toiling upon the superstructure of the new south; not wanted in cabals, intrigues, conventions; not the journeymen who where revamping the political edifice; not mechanics who were furbishing the weapons of plunder; not trained to the harness as beasts of burden in dragging the car of reconstruction with its whetted knives over the prostrated country. Hence it was that gaunt poverty with its steel tined fork was constantly prodding the old negroes who had turned their backs upon their masters and whose new masters were dull of hearing, hence it was that so many who had hungered for the flesh pots were going back to the leaks and garlic; hence it was that hunger had given such acuteness to old Ned's sense of smell, that Alice was greeted with an exclamation brimming over with gratitude. "I'm so skeert, young missis, dat I haint ergwine to git outen dis house in a hole munt." The exclamation provoked a smile from the sweet girl who came laden with good things for Ned and she replied apologetically, "I am sorry, uncle Ned, that I couldn't know just what you wanted." The sick negro shook his head, for his mouth was too full for verbal explanations, and then bowed his thanks, observing after a moment. "Clarsy, when I heerd yung missis at de do I node it was Santy Clors, sho nuff." "Bress you hart, missis, enny nigger dat wudn't fite twell def fur yu und ole marser had ort to be hung by de nek twell hes ded." Ned would have extemporized upon the subject perhaps at greater length; but for the interruption of a dilapidated negro, dressed in a dingy threadbare blue uniform; whose white head was covered by a decayed beaver, from which a dirty red handkerchief hung over his left eye. The new comer was Joshua; perhaps the first and most patriotic recruit in the army of the freedmen; among the first to cut asunder the ligature of slavery.