what was then the Far West,
married a white woman and reared a large family, whose descendants, now
in the fourth or fifth remove from the Negro, are in all probability
wholly unaware of their origin. A sister of this pioneer emigrant
remained in the place of her birth and formed an irregular union with a
white man of means, with whom she lived for many years and for whom she
bore a large number of children, who became about evenly divided between
white and colored, fixing their status by the marriages they made. One
of the daughters, for instance, married a white man and reared in a
neighboring county a family of white children, who, in all probability,
were as active as any one else in the recent ferocious red-shirt
campaign to disfranchise the Negroes.

In this same town there was stationed once, before the war, at the
Federal arsenal there located, an officer who fell in love with a "white
Negro" girl, as our Southern friends impartially dub them. This officer
subsequently left the army, and carried away with him to the North the
whole family of his inamorata. He married the woman, and their
descendants, who live in a large Western city, are not known at all as
persons of color, and show no trace of their dark origin.

Two notable bishops of the Roman Catholic communion in the United States
are known to be the sons of a slave mother and a white father, who,
departing from the usual American rule, gave his sons freedom, education
and a chance in life, instead of sending them to the auction block.
Colonel T.W. Higginson, in his _Cheerful Yesterdays_, relates the story
of a white colored woman whom he assisted in her escape from slavery or
its consequences, who married a white man in the vicinity of Boston and
lost her identity with the colored race. How many others there must be
who know of similar instances! Grace King, in her "Story of New
Orleans," to which I have referred, in speaking of a Louisiana law which
required the public records, when dealing with persons of color, always
to specify the fact of color, in order, so far had the admixture of
races gone, to distinguish them from whites, says: "But the officers of
the law could be bribed, and the qualification once dropped acted,
inversely, as a patent of pure blood."

A certain well-known Shakspearean actress has a strain of Negro blood,
and a popular leading man under a well-known manager is similarly
gifted. It would be interesting to give their names, but