a bar. This was one of the Captain's
benefactions. "If you pay your money for it, you've as good a right to
your liquor as any one, I guess," he observed. "Not that it's anything
to me, of course; but I allow I like to see fair play!"

It was something to him, however: the new store had a silent partner;
and this was but one of many small and silent enterprises in which he
was engaged throughout the neighborhood.

The women of Jubilee, more faithful than the men, still sent their
children to school; but they did it with discouraged hearts, poor
things! Often now they were seen with bandaged heads and bruised bodies,
the result of drunken blows from husband or brother; and, left alone,
they were obliged to labor all day to get the poor food they ate, and to
keep clothes on their children. Patient by nature, they lived along as
best they could, and toiled in their small fields like horses; but the
little prides, the vague, grotesque aspirations and hopes that had come
to them with their freedom, gradually faded away. "A blue-painted front
do'," "a black-silk apron with red ribbons," "to make a minister of
little Job," and "a real crock'ry pitcher," were wishes unspoken now.
The thing was only how to live from day to day, and keep the patched
clothes together. In the mean while trashy finery was sold at the new
store, and the younger girls wore gilt ear-rings.

The master, toiling on at his vain task, was at his wit's end. "They
will not work; before long they must steal," he said. He brooded and
thought, and at last one morning he came to a decision. The same day in
the afternoon he set out for Hildore Corners. He had thought of a plan.
As he was walking rapidly through the pine-woods Harnett Ammerton on
horseback passed him. This time the Northerner had no questions to
ask--nay, he almost hung his head, so ashamed was he of the reputation
that had attached itself to the field of his labors. But the planter
reined in his horse when he saw who it was: he was the questioner now.

"Schoolmaster," he began, "in the name of all the white families about
here, I really must ask if you can do nothing to keep in order those
miserable, drinking, ruffianly negroes of yours over at Jubilee? Why, we
shall all be murdered in our beds before long! Are you aware of the
dangerous spirit they have manifested lately?"

"Only too well," said David.

"What are you going to do? How will it end?"

"God knows."

"God knows! Is that all