Sitting one night in the writing room of a country hotel in South Carolina, a young man opposite, with a face as smooth as a baby's and as pretty as a girl's, volunteered to tell where he had just been, a discreditable tale. It soon developed that his business was the sale of goods on instalments, chiefly to Negroes, and that in that little town of Florence he had no less than five hundred and ninety transactions then going on; that his profits were about fifty per cent on his sales; that nineteen twentieths of the transactions would be paid up; but that sometimes he had a little trouble in making collections. "For instance, only yesterday," said he, "I went to a nigger woman's house where they had bought two skirt patterns. When I knocked at the door, a little girl came, and she says: 'Mammy ain't to home,' says she, but I walked right in, and there was a bigger girl, who says, 'Mamma has gone down street,' but I says, 'I know better than that, you ---- nigger!' And I pushed right into the kitchen, and there she was behind the door, and I walked right up to her, and I says, 'Do you think I'll allow you to teach that innocent child to lie, you ---- nigger? I'll show you,' says I; and I hit her a couple of good ones right in the face. She come back at me with a kind of an undercut right under the jaw. I knew it wouldn't do any good to hit her on the head, but I landed a solid one in the middle of her nose; and I made those women go and get those skirts and give them up before I left the place."