Sixty-five years had stiffened the joints of the old man; his muscles and sinews were relaxed and gouty, but the order must be obeyed; no temporizing with the policy of reconstruction, no annulling an order when issued from a court. The old gentleman halting from sheer weakness ascended the rickety stairway of the court room and he saw the power of the law, its learning, its dignity prostituted to ignoble purposes. He saw the power of reconstruction, its ignorance, its venality accentuated to a degree that provoked his abhorrence. He saw as he entered the house the American flag drooping in graceful folds over the bench, and he felt that judicial authority was reinforced by the strength and dominion that overpowered the South. A stupid negro as black as the hinges of midnight sat upon the judgment seat; sat there as a representative of the law that had for its substantial underpinning in all the bygone ages, honesty, capacity, promptitude, justice; sat there under a commission to checkmate evil. There were but two white men in this revolting presence, beside the veteran, whose face was now marked by fatigue and despair, and who dropped exhausted upon a rude bench. They were not there from choice but because the law of the bewildered land had brought them there. Judge Blackstock's black face looked out of a canopy as of carded wool; beetling eyebrows of snowy whiteness would rise and fall automatically like the crest of a kingfisher; the contour of his face was made ridiculously picturesque by great brass rimmed spectacles that sat reposefully below the bridge of his nose. A spring tide one day washed him out of a fisherman's hut into the office of a justice of the peace, where he was dipping out of his Dutch nets a larger fry. The old negro was not vicious or malignant, only ignorant, fanatical and superstitious, with a religious vein that ran in eccentric curves and sharp lines through his stupid nature. Laflin was his apotheosis, his providence, his inspiration. It was Laflin he believed who had placed in the mid-heavens the great luminary of freedom; who had written upon amaranthine leaves the proclamation of emancipation; and who had erected within his reach the huge commissariat dripping all the while with fatness. It was to Laflin that he carried his docket every morning to be paragraphed by stars and asterisks against the names of particular offenders; and it was to Laflin that he read the judgments of the court whenever rebels were indicted. If "Ilderim" the sheik could have seen the old negro with his mace of office presiding in his court he would have recognized his maternal uncle.