e," locked
his door, and read again.

Two or three well-known alumni of Rosemont and two or three Northern
capitalists--railroad prospectors--were, on the following Friday, at the
Swanee Hotel to be the guests of the Duke of Suez, as Ravenel was fondly
called by the Rosemont boys. To show Suez at its best by night as well
as by day, there was to be a Rosemont-Montrose ball in the hotel
dining-room. Major Garnet opposed its being _called_ a ball, and it was
announced as a musical reception and promenade. Mr. Leggett knew quite
as well as Garnet and Ravenel that the coming visitors were behind the
bill he had just voted for.

Johanna, the letter said, would be at the ball as an attendant in the
ladies' cloak-room. It bade him meet her that night at eleven on the old
bridge that spanned a ravine behind the hotel, where a back street ended
at the edge of a neglected grove.

"Lawd, Lawd! little letteh, little letteh! is you de back windeh o'
heavm, aw is you de front gate o' hell? Th' ain't no way to tell but by
tryin'! Oh, how _kin_ I resk it? An' yit, how kin I he'p but resk it?

"Sheh! ain't I resk my life time an' time ag'in jess for my _abstrac'
rights_ to be a Republican niggeh?

"Ef they'd on'y shoot me! But they won't. They won't evm hang me;
they'll jess tie me to a tree and bu'n me--wet me th'oo with coal-oil,
tech a match--O Lawd!" He poured a tremendous dram, looked at it long,
then stepped to the window, and with a quaking hand emptied both glass
and bottle on the ground, as if he knew life depended on a silent tongue
in a sober head.

And then he glanced once more at the letter, folded it, and let it
slowly into his pocket.

"'Happy as a big sun-floweh,' is you? I ain't. I ain't no happier'n a
pig on the ice. O it's mawnstus p'ecipitous! But it's gran'! It's mo'n
gran'; it's muccurial! it's puffic'ly nocturnial!" With an exalted
solemnity of face, half ardor, half anguish, he stiffened heroically and
gulped out,

"I'll be thah!"

* * * * *

Friday came. John March and half-a-dozen other Rosemonters, a committee
to furnish "greens" for garlanding the walls and doorways, hurried about
in an expectancy and perturbation, now gay, now grave, that seemed quite
excessive as the mere precursors of an evening dance. They gathered
their greenery from the grove down beyond the old bridge and ravine,
where the ground was an unbroken web of honeysuckle vines.

On this old bridge