hey get religion, they
think a great and sudden change must come over them--changing their
very lives."

She laughed her ringing little laugh: "I told you of your father's
and my love affair. Why, I was engaged to three other men at the same
time--positively I was. And I would have been just as happy with any
of them."

"Why did you marry father, then?"

Her mother laughed and tapped the toe of her shoe playfully against
the fender: "It was a silly reason; he swam the Tennessee River on
his horse to see me one day, when the ferry-boat was a wreck. I
married him."

"Would not the others have done as well?"

"Yes, but I knew your father was brave. You cannot love a coward--no
woman can. But let a man be brave--no matter what his faults are--the
rest is all a question of time. You would soon learn to love him as I
did your father."

Mrs. Westmore was wise. She changed the subject.

"Have you noticed Uncle Bisco lately, mother?" asked Alice after a
while.

"Why, yes; I intended to ask you about him."

"He says there are threats against his life--his and Aunt Charity's.
He had a terrible dream last night, and he would have me to interpret
it."

"Quite Biblical," laughed her mother. "What was it?"

"They have been very unhappy all day--you know the negroes have been
surly and revengeful since the election of Governor Houston--they
believe they will be put back into slavery and they know that Uncle
Bisco voted with his white friends. It is folly, of course--but they
beat Captain Roland's old body servant nearly to death because he
voted with his old master. And Uncle Bisco has heard threats that he
and Aunt Charity will be visited in a like manner. I think it will
soon blow over, though at times I confess I am often worried about
them, living alone so far off from us, in the cabin in the wood."

"What was Uncle Bisco's dream?" asked Mrs. Westmore.

"Why, he said an angel had brought him water to drink from a
Castellonian Spring. Now, I don't know what a Castellonian Spring is,
but that was the word he used, and that he was turned into a live-oak
tree, old and moss-grown. Then he stood in the forest surrounded by
scrub-oaks and towering over them and other mean trees when suddenly
they all fell upon him and cut him down. Now, he says, these
scrub-oaks are the radical negroes who wish to kill him for voting
with the whites. You will laugh at my interpretation," she went on.
"I told him that the small black oak