When our hopes were feeblest, and our horizon darkest, the scalawag fled like a hound to the sheltering woods whence he sallied forth like an outlaw. The reddened disc of the sun that went down at Appomattox gave him an inspiration for his hellish work, and he went out in the gloom of the starless night, declaring with a more vicious temper than did Henry of Agincourt "the fewer the men the greater the honor" or in its appropriate paraphrase "the deeper the pockets the greater the spoil." His philanthropy and selfish interests never clash. He claimed always to be rigidly righteous, and was seen in the camp-meeting and the church sanctified and demure to a proverb. He spoke of the poor negro in paroxysms of charity--a most rare benevolence which employed its means in theft and crime; a charity which performs its vows and gives its alms with money plundered from the freedmen. The scalawag like other unclassified vermin was without respectable antecedents; with an acute sense of smell like the "lap-heavy" scout of the Andes, he sought his prey when there was no fear of the approach of man. As an Irish barrister once wrote upon the door of a plebians' carriage, "Why do you laugh?" so the humorist of the sixties could have written upon the shirt-front of the scalawag "Why do people hold their noses?" He was never mentioned by naturalists, unless under some other name he was paired off with the vulture. In reconstruction days the transformation of this abortion of nature from vulture to serpent was made without the break of a feather or the splitting of a talon. With a seductive grimace he whispered into the open ear of the freedmen "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die." He was as much an augury of evil as the brood of ravens that once alighted upon Vespasian's pillar. Had he been seen plying his vocation in the first empire Napoleon would have said to Fouche, "Shoot the accursed beast on the spot." The carpet bagger when not fighting the pestiferous vermin in the Chickahominy swamps was pilfering. He went into the army conscripted like a gentleman; he came out of the army at night when the back of the sentry was turned and without a furlough, like a patriot. These twain were the autocrats of the new south, which had its christening in the blood of heroes; they were the furies that rode the red harlot around the circle, when her flanks were still wet with human slaughter, and her speed was increased by the jeering negroes. When Sister Charity in an occasional fit would fall unconsciously into the receptive bosom of her black lover in the prayer-meeting, with the wild exclamation "Bress Gord I sees de hosses und de charyut er cumin!" they would clap their hands in joy and shout, "Persevere in the good cause my sister." When old deacon Johnson upon some happy suggestion from the "sliding elder" would turn up the white of one eye, they would turn up the whites of the others; and when