ed the private office, sank into the armchair, and looked out
of the window upon the square below. The view was mildly interesting.
The old brick market-house with the tower was quite picturesque. On a
wagon-scale at one end the public weighmaster was weighing a load of
hay. In the booths under the wide arches several old negro women were
frying fish on little charcoal stoves--the odor would have been
appetizing to one who had not breakfasted. On the shady side stood
half a dozen two-wheeled carts, loaded with lightwood and drawn by
diminutive steers, or superannuated army mules branded on the flank
with the cabalistic letters "C. S. A.," which represented a vanished
dream, or "U. S. A.," which, as any negro about the market-house would
have borne witness, signified a very concrete fact. Now and then a
lady or gentleman passed with leisurely step--no one ever hurried in
Patesville--or some poor white sandhiller slouched listlessly along
toward store or bar-room.

Tryon mechanically counted the slabs of gingerbread on the nearest
market-stall, and calculated the cubical contents of several of the
meagre loads of wood. Having exhausted the view, he turned to the
table at his elbow and picked up a medical journal, in which he read
first an account of a marvelous surgical operation. Turning the leaves
idly, he came upon an article by a Southern writer, upon the perennial
race problem that has vexed the country for a century. The writer
maintained that owing to a special tendency of the negro blood, however
diluted, to revert to the African type, any future amalgamation of the
white and black races, which foolish and wicked Northern negrophiles
predicted as the ultimate result of the new conditions confronting the
South, would therefore be an ethnological impossibility; for the
smallest trace of negro blood would inevitably drag down the superior
race to the level of the inferior, and reduce the fair Southland,
already devastated by the hand of the invader, to the frightful level
of Hayti, the awful example of negro incapacity. To forefend their
beloved land, now doubly sanctified by the blood of her devoted sons
who had fallen in the struggle to maintain her liberties and preserve
her property, it behooved every true Southron to stand firm against the
abhorrent tide of radicalism, to maintain the supremacy and purity of
his all-pervading, all-conquering race, and to resist by every
available means the threatened do