y adduced
by his rivals respectively, was rejected by an indignant auditory, is to
anticipate the reader.

When, at length, the mill-wheel had performed its last revolution, and the
mill boys, astride their sacks of flour, dispersed to their homes, it was
with the solemn conviction that some great mystery had dawned upon their
young lives, to whose after developments they must look for that rational
sequel which had thus far been denied them. Hundreds there were in this
and other localities of the South who, while they rejected the idea of a
Ku-Klux phantom, were equally slow in accepting the current theories which
dissociated them and their plans from all preternatural agencies.

In every man's breast there is more or less of that mysterious element
which, under proper conditions of time and place, sees ghosts in shadows,
and hears them in the faintest echo. These attributes (if the term be
admissible) implanted in the breast of the child at its birth, though
weeded with ever so careful a hand during the years of training, still
retain some tendril hold, which no process of metaphysics can uproot, and
which in the future years send out fruit-bearing branches that make and
unmake human destiny. Of the majority of human kind, it may be said that
their lives and possible achievements are covered under a great incubus of
superstitious thought and feeling. And if, at some late period of
existence they take the tide at a favorable turn and struggle up into the
pure surroundings of an honest life, the effort frequently comes too late,
for they see in this change only some postponed dispensation of _luck_ in
their favor, and so are worse bondmen than before.

Some men there are who will even confess to you that they are governed by
these strange impulses in what they term the "trifling details of life,"
but as men who admit "trifling details" into their lives rarely attain to
a higher life than is constituted by the sum of these, their admission
covers a greater scope than they probably intended. Others, equally
candid, adopt a different mode of imparting the same confidence, and
naively tell you that in "the more _important_ concerns of life" they are
indebted for guidance to an unseen agency. But as these men wholly mistake
the meaning of the adjective they use, adjusting it to such retail
considerations as flow from their daily business or dwell at the bottom of
their post-prandial cup, we must take their confession to inc