mistaken for aught but the hooting of an owl, broke the
stillness of the neighboring forest, and was quickly replied to at the
distance of perhaps a furlong in the opposite direction. The echoes
awakened by these signals were still busy at hide-and-seek with the
shadows in the old building, when two forms, clad in long robes and
wearing high-peaked caps, crossed the plateau to its threshold, and giving
way to an involuntary chuckle as they gazed first upon the wrecked
surroundings, passed to its inner precincts. Perhaps a full minute elapsed
before they reappeared at the entrance way, and, being joined here by a
companion with two led horses, they placed their bags of cow-bones on the
latter, and, mounting, galloped swiftly into the darkness.

CHAPTER VI.

GHOST FEATURE OF THE MOVEMENT. ITS PHILOSOPHY.

Contrasted Views of the Organization inspired by its Dealings with
the Public--Its Political Bearing--Its _Objects_ not deemed Harmful
to Society--New England Transcendentalists, and the Ponderous Science
which they put before the World under the Title of
"Negropholism"--The Colored Man in the South--Kindly Feeling for the
Race cherished by Native Southerners--Households Presided over by
Colored Matrons--Superstitious Tendencies of Cuffey--One of the
Conditions of his Tropical Nativity--Heathenish Lapses--His Ideas
about "Ghosts," and the Realm which they Inhabit--Interviewing the
former--Spook Kinsfolk--He holds them in the highest Veneration--The
ideal "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--Wherein it was a Failure--The "Infantile
Sex" and their Greed for Ghost-lore--Fighting their way through
Legions of Shadowy Foes to their "Curtained Rest"--Young Professors
of the Spiritual Science--Painful Reminiscences--Use to which the
Aged Patriarch, or Beldam, as the Case might be, put their
Prerogative--Talent for relating Ghost Stories--The Young White Men
of the South trained up in this School--Insight into Negro Character
obtained therefrom--K. K. K. Affectation of the Supernatural based
upon the latter.

The two preceding chapters may occur to those who were not informed of the
nature and degree of the excitement which waited upon the movements of
these secret organizations in obscure and uninformed neighborhoods, and
among the negroes in various localities, as partaking of the hypercritical
in narrative. But those who, by reason of re