By a custom that obtained very generally in the South in the post-bellum days, there was a division of offices inequitably made, however, between the carpet-baggers and the negroes; and to the negroes was assigned among others of inconsiderable revenue, the office of county coroner. This office for many generations before the war was a sinecure, but a pictorial page now appears in the history of reconstruction, electrotyped in disgusting caricatures. The office of coroner was constructed out of a mediæval original; it was both ancient and honorable--a remnant of the feudal system that superseded other forms of government in Europe before and since the crusade. So considerable were its revenues and dignity, that the lords chief justices of the King's Bench of England coveted and enjoyed its emoluments and title; and to descend from an antiquity so dignified and remote, from bewigged and begowned lords justices to 15th amendment freedmen, was quite a sheer descent. But reconstruction came with fantastical ideals; with its own peculiar and irritating forms and institutions, and the political fabric was ludicrously inverted and the freedmen appeared to walk through the air on stilts. When post-mortem investigations were exceedingly rare in a county that boasted of its healthfulness and its obedience to law, the per diem of the coroner was fixed by legislative enactment to ten dollars, with certain enumerated charges, such as summoning, swearing and empanelling the jury of inquest. But now there was an epidemic of accidental deaths in this phenomenal era. Among the negroes the most natural thing was to die--to die from exposure, from starvation, and sometimes from heroic doses of manhood suffrage. They died in the river, in the creek, in the lowgrounds. Old Uncle Elijah Thorpe, the coroner, would sit moodily by the hour on his dilapidated stoop, intently gazing into the firmament above him for the appearance of "de sky shurruff," and when the circling scavengers of the country would flap and dip their pinions below the fringe of the cypresses that bordered the river, his spirits would revive, and refreshing smiles would play hide and seek in the black caverns of his face.