gallery of the white Episcopal
church. Upon the ground floor was a certain pew which could be seen
from her seat, where once had sat a gentleman whose pleasures had not
interfered with the practice of his religion. She might have had a
better seat in a church where a Northern missionary would have preached
a sermon better suited to her comprehension and her moral needs, but
she preferred the other. She was not white, alas! she was shut out
from this seeming paradise; but she liked to see the distant glow of
the celestial city, and to recall the days when she had basked in its
radiance. She did not sympathize greatly with the new era opened up
for the emancipated slaves; she had no ideal love of liberty; she was
no broader and no more altruistic than the white people around her, to
whom she had always looked up; and she sighed for the old days, because
to her they had been the good days. Now, not only was her king dead,
but the shield of his memory protected her no longer.

Molly had lost one child, and his grave was visible from the kitchen
window, under a small clump of cedars in the rear of the two-acre lot.
For even in the towns many a household had its private cemetery in
those old days when the living were close to the dead, and ghosts were
not the mere chimeras of a sick imagination, but real though
unsubstantial entities, of which it was almost disgraceful not to have
seen one or two. Had not the Witch of Endor called up the shade of
Samuel the prophet? Had not the spirit of Mis' Molly's dead son
appeared to her, as well as the ghostly presence of another she had
loved?

In 1855, Mis' Molly's remaining son had grown into a tall, slender lad
of fifteen, with his father's patrician features and his mother's
Indian hair, and no external sign to mark him off from the white boys
on the street. He soon came to know, however, that there was a
difference. He was informed one day that he was black. He denied the
proposition and thrashed the child who made it. The scene was repeated
the next day, with a variation,--he was himself thrashed by a larger
boy. When he had been beaten five or six times, he ceased to argue the
point, though to himself he never admitted the charge. His playmates
might call him black; the mirror proved that God, the Father of all,
had made him white; and God, he had been taught, made no
mistakes,--having made him white, He must have meant him to be white.

In the "hall" or parlor of h