as beloved children. When they were ill he doctored them;
when they quarreled, he acted as judge, and, without the cost of a
lawsuit, gave them more rational judgment than they would have obtained
in a court. While bearing a large part of the expense of the Episcopal
church under the live-oaks at the water's edge, he helped to keep open
the Methodist meeting among the pines where his black children went on
Sunday mornings. He looked askance at first at Ellen; and while he never
grew to like her ways, believing that she put false notions of equality
into the children's heads, he was just and admitted that she had
improved the morals of the place. For himself, he should always look
upon the Negro as the white man's charge and make every allowance for
his wrong-doing. What would be a sin in a white man, in a Negro would be
only the misdemeanor of a child. Once, when one of his Negro tenants
murdered a black neighbor in a drunken fight, he urged the judge to show
clemency, to make the sentence lenient. "Remember," he admonished, "this
man is black, and it is not one-tenth as bad for a black man to do a
deed like this as for a white one." This attitude did not prevent his
treating with respect the Negroes, men and women, whom he knew both at
his own place and up and down the river, and they in their turn loved to
drop a word with him, and looked with affectionate regard upon the tall
figure in its well-worn cutaway coat, its straw hat with the black
ribbon, its big, comfortable collar. One might see him of a Sunday
walking among the pines, inquiring for Lucindy or Rose or Ebenezer, as
the case might be.

On this Sunday afternoon, while Hertha sat with her mother on the steps,
John Merryvale was walking with his son in the orange grove. They had
been examining the trees when two colored lads, dressed in their Sunday
best, bowed in crossing their path. Lee nodded carelessly to the young
men, but his father raised his hat. The son noticed it, and spoke, half
jestingly, of this act of courtesy.

"There isn't another man in the state would do that, Father. A nigger's
a nigger to the folk I know about here."

"I remember," his father answered, "the retort Jefferson Davis gave when
questioned for returning the bow of a black man. 'I can't afford,' he
said, 'to be less of a gentleman than he.'"

Young Merryvale was silent, wondering whether the day had passed of both
the old-time white and colored gentleman.

"This is a beautif