ruit trees. For this Col. English prosecuted the negro,
and on Feb. 9, before a local Justice, ex-Sheriff Wiseman, he got a
judgment for $100. On the date stated, during a casual meeting, hot
words grew into an altercation, and Col. English shot the negro.
Mathis was a powerful man. English is a cripple, being lame in a leg
from a wound received in the Mexican war.

"A trial was had before a preliminary court recently, Col. S.C. Vance
appearing for Col. English. After a hearing of all the testimony the
court reached a decision of justifiable homicide and English was
released. The locality of the shooting is in the mountains of western
North Carolina, and not far from the Flat Rock mica mine, the scene of
the brutal midnight murder, Feb. 17, of Burleson, Miller, and Horton
by Rae and Anderson, two revenue officers, who took this means to gain
possession of the mica mine."

My knowledge of such affairs in the South is, that the black and the
white have an altercation over some trivial thing, and the white to
end the argument shoots the black man down. The negro is always a
"_powerful fellow_" and the white man a "weak sickly man." The law and
public opinion always side with the white man.

CHAPTER IV

_The Triumph of the Vanquished_

There are those throughout the length and breadth of our great country
who make a fair living by traducing better men than themselves; by
continually crying out that the black man is incapable of being
civilized; that he is born with the elements of barbarity,
improvidence and untruthfulness so woven into his very nature that no
amount of opportunity, labor, love, or sacrifice can ever lift him out
of the condition, the "sphere God designed him to occupy"--as if the
great Common Parent took any more pains in the making of one man than
another. But those who utter such blasphemy, who call in the
assistance of the Almighty to fight the battles of the devil, are the
very persons who do most by precept and example to make possible the
verification of their blasphemy. They carry their lamentations into
the pulpit, grave convocations, newspapers, and even into halls of
legislation, State and Federal. They are the false prophets who blind
the eye of reason and blunt the sympathies of honest, well-meaning
men. They are the Jonases on board the ship of progress. They belong
to that class of men who would pick flaws in the finest work of art.
They find fault with the great mass of ignoran