lloverishes," and
knowing the penalty for interrupting the services at this interesting
stage, screamed out in affright, and reaching that point over a causeway
of the best Boston built brogans, was content to embrace her toes around a
neighboring sycamore. Nineteenthly stood up for duty,--arranged its
cravat,--tip-toed,--and lo! instead of a chorus of grunts, a chorus of
gasps, full-chested, deep drawn, and suffocating. There he stood, or
rather towered, just where the rays of light fell strongest, garbed in
funereal black, and full twelve feet from crown to sole.[B] Steadying
himself after an awkward, but ghostlily impressive bow, there issued from
that portion of his corporeal frame which might be supposed to represent
the mean in a mathematical estimate of his inches, the following
announcement: "I am a Ku-Klux!" and then from the upper extreme the
following confirmation of this report: "I have just forded the
Tallahatchie River, and am the advance guard of the old original whoopers,
surnamed K. K. K.;" and then from mean and extreme, in dismal chorus,
"Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching, etc."

Nothing could be further from our purpose than to injure that excellent
person, either in the eyes of his contemporaries or of that posterity
which he was wont to invoke so confidently from the more thrilling
promontories of his discourse; but a decent regard for the "proprieties"
of this narrative compels us to state that the reverend orator observing,
or fancying that he observed, something mandatory, and withal personal in
the terms of this refrain, at once inaugurated the "tramp" exercise over
the heads of the assembly, and reaching _terra firma_, one mile from the
point of embarkation, and seeing nothing in the homogeneity of a mob
particularly attractive to a man of genius, proceeded to divest himself of
his surroundings in the best executed "lonesome" since the days of
Ahimaaz, the son of Zadok. This movement, moreover, possessed a striking
appropriateness, inasmuch as it rendered him _practically_ the leader of
his flock, and perhaps on no former occasion of his extended ministry did
he ever discharge the duties of the "relation" with the same yearning
solicitude for the success of the issue, even admitting, in extenuation of
the past, that the most lukewarm of his constituency did their whole duty
on this memorable occasion. As the writer has never been successful at
equating distances since he was gobbled by