What had become of the warning paragraph in the reconstruction calendar? The three blood red stars that punctuated the enigmatical judgment, "sixty days within which to prove your loyalty." Powers that be, at whose shrine shall the persecuted man make the act of apotheosis? Shall it be at the altar of Laflin, the freedman's deity? Shall it be in the presence of the cringing minions who will mock at his calamity and laugh when his fear cometh? An arctic night has dropped down upon the south; and in our dense blindness we know not in what direction lies the Serbonian bog. We once erected upon this soil a mighty temple which wisdom and virtue consecrated to patriotism. We laid the edifice upon foundations of concession and compromise; and we were vain enough to believe that it would stand forever; but not so. So the dykes of Holland; the mountains of Switzerland, and the surrounding Sea of Venice were proclaimed as everlasting pledges for the preservation of patriotism, but intestine struggles engendered those revolutionary factions which invited the attack of a despotism and secured its victory. So reasoned with himself this veteran of the civil war, and the father of a loyal-hearted daughter, this slave of a power whose minions were drunken with its excess. CHAPTER XVI. UNDER THE HAMMER. As Colonel Seymour was passing a group of negroes in the court-yard this irritating remark from one of them arrested his attention. "Dat dar secesh's home is agwine to be sold at auction ter day under a margige, und de boss is ergwine ter buy hit;" and very soon thereafter a half-grown negro boy ringing a huge bell, and bearing aloft a placard as imperiously as a Roman lictor bore the axe and fasces, halted before him, and displayed offensively the following advertisement. "By virtue of a certain deed of mortgage executed by John W. Seymour and wife Alice to James W. Bowden, and duly recorded in the proper office of the ---- county, and value duly assigned to me, I shall sell for cash on Saturday, the 6th day of November, 186-- the lands and premises described in said mortgage deed, and known and designated as Ingleside, containing twenty-five hundred acres," Abram Laflin, assignee. Thus ran the publication that may possibly furnish a key to the mystic meaning of the three blood-red stars under the written order. "Sixty days in which to prove your loyalty." To-day, and the patrimonial estate of Ingleside with all but its cherished memories, will pass by right of purchase into the hands of the carpet baggers and negroes; to-day, and the axe of the barbarian will be laid at the roots of the ancestral oaks; to-day, and the grained corridors will echo to ribaldry and wassail; to-day, and the war scathed veteran and his beautiful daughter, like the pariahs of Hindoostan, shelterless vagrants, will beg their bread and home. "If an uninterpretable destiny; if an inscrutable providence so orders and