ually magical, though we might never have known it: that breath by
your delicate lips would have blown back these horrible shadows; and
instead of all this din and confusion of house-hauling, we should have
had silence this day in the streets of Timberville. You don't see it? In
plain phrase, then, understand: you took not in the stranger at your
gate; but he found refuge with these blacks; and because they showed
mercy unto him, the sword of Frisbie's wrath was turned aside from them,
and, edged by Stephen's witty jest, directed against you and yours.
Hence this interesting scene which you look down upon from your windows,
at the beautiful hour of sunset, which you love. And, oh, to think of
it! between your chamber and those golden sunsets that negro hut and
those negroes will always be henceforth!

Now don't you wish; Madam, you had had compassion on the wayfarer? But
we will not mock at your calamity. You did precisely what any of us
would have been only too apt to do in your place. You told the simple
truth, when you said you didn't want the ragged wretch in your house.
And what person of refinement, I'd like to know, would have wanted him?
For, say what you will, it is a most disagreeable thing to admit
downright dirty vagabonds into our elegant dwellings. And dangerous,
besides; for they might murder us in the night,--or steal something! Oh,
we fastidious and fearful! where is our charity? where is the heart of
trust? There was of old a Divine Man, who had not where to lay his
head,--whom the wise of those days scoffed at as a crazy fellow,--whom
respectable people shunned,--who made himself the companion of the poor,
the comforter of the distressed, the helper of those in trouble, and the
healer of diseases;--who shrank neither from the man or woman of sin,
nor from the loathsome leper, nor from sorrow and death for our
sakes,--whose gospel we now profess to live by, and----

But let us not be "soft." We are reasonably Christian, we hope; and it
shows low breeding to be ultra. (Was the Carpenter's Son low-bred?)

And now the Judge rides home in the dusk of the December day. It is
still light enough, however, for him to see that Frisbie's vacant lot
has been made an Ararat of; and he could hear the Noachian noises, were
it ever so dark. The awful jest bursts upon him; he hears the screaming
of the bomb-shell, then the explosion. But the mind of this man is (so
to speak) casemated. It is a shock,--but he never on