light of its enthusiasm go out in darkness. What, indeed, could be more appealing to the finer things in human nature than the fiery cross? "By that symbol we conquer." It carries the idea of illumination and sacrifice. It symbolizes a love that lights the way to the noblest service; it symbolizes a service that is impelled by a burning love. Here lies the only way forward. The world's amelioration is proclaimed by the glowing cross. We sometimes think of the cross as remote, as belonging to the past, as an isolated event. The cross is now and here, and it is an essential part in the advancement of the world's civilization. It means, in the highest sense, freedom--the freedom of all mankind. But there is no emancipation in all the world that comes as a gratuity. Wherever human life is freed a ransom price must be paid. When it comes to the liberation of human thought and the breaking of chains from immortal souls, there is no ransom that will pay the price except that into which men mint their lives, and out of which they coin their higher selves. All this and more the fiery cross of the Ku Klux Klan conveys to the Klansman. It means the supreme agony of love through the sacrifice of life, to the end that freedom and democracy may be secured to all mankind forever. [Illustration: Stone Mountain--The Klan Rendezvous] CHAPTER IX The Rendezvous Once a year, to be exact, on the sixth day of May, the Klan from all over the country makes a pilgrimage to Stone Mountain. Men from every walk and station in life leave their daily pursuits and journey to the Klonvocation. They come from the pulpit, the schoolroom, the market, the bank, the mine, the factory, the shop, the farm, and from high offices of public trust and authority, and meet at this unique rendezvous. Stone Mountain is sixteen miles south of Atlanta. The place of assembly is not without interest. It is a huge boulder compacted into solid granite and thrown up, ages ago, by some terrific convulsion. The stone is three miles in circumference and something more than a mile in altitude by the trail leading to its summit. Its frowning and forbidding front is scant of foliage. Soil which the winds have brought and deposited in its crevices and on its craggy sides has no deepness. Adventurous shrubs and trees that have sprung up from time to time have been beaten back by sun and storm because they had no anchorage in the earth. To this mountain boulder of solid granite the Klan resorts for comradeship and consecration. The pilgrimage is not unlike that conjectured by a noble and worthy order which takes its initiates to the far East, travels them through the unmarked desert, over blistering sands, and under a sky of brass, while the breath of the winds is like that of a furnace, scorching the weary pilgrims as step by step they fight on to the Mecca. The Klansmen make their way along the poorly defined and jagged trail of Stone Mountain, climbing