“Yessum,” he stammered. “And you won’t tie any more tin cans to dogs like you did to Charlie Gaston’s little terrier, will you? I like boys full of life and spirit, just so they don’t do mean and cruel things.” The boy was ready to promise her anything. He was charmed with her beauty and gentle ways. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in the world. As they started toward the door, she gently slipped one arm around him, put her hand under his chin and kissed him. Then he was ready to die for her. It was the first kiss he had ever received from a woman’s lips. His mother was not a demonstrative woman. He never recalled a kiss she had given him. His blood tingled with the delicious sense of this one’s sweetness. All the afternoon he sat out under a tree and dreamed and watched the house where this wonderful thing had happened to him. CHAPTER XI--SIMON LEGREE IN the death of Mr. Lincoln, a group of radical politicians, hitherto suppressed, saw their supreme opportunity to obtain control of the nation in the crisis of an approaching Presidential campaign. Now they could fasten their schemes of proscription, confiscation, and revenge upon the South. Mr. Lincoln had held these wolves at bay during his life by the power of his great personality. But the Lion was dead, and the Wolf, who had snarled and snapped at him in life, put on his skin and claimed the heritage of his power. The Wolf whispered his message of hate, and in the hour of partisan passion became the master of the nation. Busy feet had been hurrying back and forth from the Southern states to Washington whispering in the Wolf’s ear the stories of sure success, if only the plan of proscription, disfranchisement of whites, and enfranchisement of blacks were carried out. This movement was inaugurated two years after the war, with every Southern state in profound peace, and in a life and death struggle with nature to prevent famine. The new revolution destroyed the Union a second time, paralysed every industry in the South, and transformed ten peaceful states into roaring hells of anarchy. We have easily outlived the sorrows of the war. That was a surgery which healed the body. But the child has not yet been born whose children’s children will live to see the healing of the wounds from those four years of chaos, when fanatics blinded by passion, armed millions of ignorant negroes and thrust them into mortal combat with the proud, bleeding, halfstarving Anglo-Saxon race of the South. Such a deed once done, can never be undone. It fixes the status of these races for a thousand years, if not for eternity. The South was now rapidly gathering into two hostile armies under these influences, with race marks as uniforms--the Black against the White. The Negro army was under the command of a triumvirate, the Carpet-bagger from the North, the native Scalawag and the Negro Demagogue.