who had started, in his
memory, from a position but little higher than his own. In an era of
change, the benefits gained thereby seemed scarcely to offset the
difficulties of readjustment.

The situation was complicated by a sense of injury on both sides.
Cherishing their theoretical equality of citizenship, which they could
neither enforce nor forget, the Negroes resented, noisly or silently,
as prudence dictated, its contemptuous denial by the whites; and
these, viewing this shadowy equality as an insult to themselves, had
sought by all the machinery of local law to emphasise and perpetuate
their own superiority. The very word "equality" was an offence.
Society went back to Egypt and India for its models; to break caste
was a greater sin than to break any or all of the ten commandments.
White and coloured children studied the same books in different
schools. White and black people rode on the same trains in separate
cars. Living side by side, and meeting day by day, the law, made and
administered by white men, had built a wall between them.

And white and black buried their dead in separate graveyards. Not
until they reached God's presence could they stand side by side in any
relation of equality. There was a Negro graveyard in Clarendon, where,
as a matter of course the coloured dead were buried. It was not an
ideal locality. The land was low and swampy, and graves must be used
quickly, ere the water collected in them. The graveyard was unfenced,
and vagrant cattle browsed upon its rank herbage. The embankment of
the railroad encroached upon one side of it, and the passing engines
sifted cinders and ashes over the graves. But no Negro had ever
thought of burying his dead elsewhere, and if their cemetery was not
well kept up, whose fault was it but their own?

The proposition, therefore, of a white man, even of Colonel French's
standing, to bury a Negro in Oak Cemetery, was bound to occasion
comment, if nothing more. There was indeed more. Several citizens
objected to the profanation, and laid their protest before the mayor,
who quietly called a meeting of the board of cemetery trustees, of
which he was the chairman.

The trustees were five in number. The board, with the single exception
of the mayor, was self-perpetuating, and the members had been chosen,
as vacancies occurred by death, at long intervals, from among the
aristocracy, who had always controlled it. The mayor, a member and
chairman of the board by v