Eunice whirled around the room gayly and said with childish glee, "You will then die with us, will you? Ha! ha! ha!" A terrible fear stole over Earl as he watched her peculiar behavior. "Live! Ha! ha! ha! 'Nigger,' 'darkey,' 'coon'--live! Yes, I'll live! I'll live! Whee--poo--poo--wheep!" screamed Eunice, now dashing wildly about the room. She had gone mad. * * * * * At the earliest moment practicable Earl bore the raving Eunice out of the Southland, carried her to a sanitarium in a northern city. Giving the physician in charge a history of the case and allowing him time to study it, Earl awaited the verdict as to Eunice's chances of recovery. "Mr. Bluefield, to be absolutely frank with you, I am compelled to say that, in my opinion, your wife's case is an incurable one. The one specific cause of her mental breakdown is the Southern situation which has borne tremendously upon her. That whole region of country is affected by a sort of sociological hysteria and we physicians are expecting more and more pathological manifestations as a result of the strain upon the people. "Only one thing could cure your wife and that is the reversal of the conditions that have wrought upon her mind. She has lucid moments, but whenever her mind forcibly recurs to the Southern situation she again plunges into the gulf of despair. If in these lucid moments you could place before her a ladder of hope, I am of the opinion that a cure would be effected. That is equivalent to saying, I fear, that the case is incurable, for I can see no way out of the Southern tangle." Such were the awful words addressed to Earl Bluefield by the physician in charge of the sanitarium when Earl called to learn of him his opinion concerning Eunice's case. Earl walked forth from the sanitarium and journeyed hurriedly to the southern border of the city. When the houses of the city were well at his back and he had an unobstructed view to the south, he paused and, holding his right hand aloft, he said: "Hear, O spirit world, if such there be, that, in the days to come, you may witness how faithfully Earl Bluefield, Humanity's Ishmaelite, kept his word. Non-existent was I until the whim of a Southern white man, trampling upon the alleged sacred canons of his race, called me into being and endowed me with the spirit of his kind. In the race into which I was thrust, I sought to manifest my martial spirit, but met with no adequate response from men grooved in the ways of peace. I found me a wife with spirit akin to mine, and like myself a victim of the bloods. The two of us withdrew from the active affairs of men, and from our own heath looked out upon the land of our birth, in the very which we had been made aliens. And now we have been dragged from our happy seclusion and gibbeted. "And thinkest thou, O Southland, that the last has been heard of me? Ha! Ha! For fear that thou mayest deceive thyself thus, hear the oath of Earl the Ishmaelite: