or nearly three hundred years, without mingling their blood in greater
or less degree; he was old enough, and had seen curious things enough,
to know that in this mingling the current had not always flowed in one
direction. Certain old decisions with which he was familiar; old
scandals that had crept along obscure channels; old facts that had come
to the knowledge of an old practitioner, who held in the hollow of his
hand the honor of more than one family, made him know that there was
dark blood among the white people--not a great deal, and that very much
diluted, and, so long as it was sedulously concealed or vigorously
denied, or lost in the mists of tradition, or ascribed to a foreign or
an aboriginal strain, having no perceptible effect upon the racial type.

Such people were, for the most part, merely on the ragged edge of the
white world, seldom rising above the level of overseers, or
slave-catchers, or sheriff's officers, who could usually be relied upon
to resent the drop of black blood that tainted them, and with the zeal
of the proselyte to visit their hatred of it upon the unfortunate
blacks that fell into their hands. One curse of negro slavery was, and
one part of its baleful heritage is, that it poisoned the fountains of
human sympathy. Under a system where men might sell their own children
without social reprobation or loss of prestige, it was not surprising
that some of them should hate their distant cousins. There were not in
Patesville half a dozen persons capable of thinking Judge Straight's
thoughts upon the question before him, and perhaps not another who
would have adopted the course he now pursued toward this anomalous
family in the house behind the cedars.

"Well, here we are again, as the clown in the circus remarks," murmured
the judge. "Ten years ago, in a moment of sentimental weakness and of
quixotic loyalty to the memory of an old friend,--who, by the way, had
not cared enough for his own children to take them away from the South,
as he might have done, or to provide for them handsomely, as he perhaps
meant to do,--I violated the traditions of my class and stepped from
the beaten path to help the misbegotten son of my old friend out of the
slough of despond, in which he had learned, in some strange way, that
he was floundering. Ten years later, the ghost of my good deed returns
to haunt me, and makes me doubt whether I have wrought more evil than
good. I wonder," he mused, "if he will