with contempt.

"If anything could reconcile me to the Satanic Institution it is the
character of the wretches who submit to it and kiss the hand that strikes.
After all, a slave deserves to be a slave. The man who is mean enough to
wear chains ought to wear them. You must teach, _teach_, TEACH these black
hounds to know they are men, not brutes!"

The old man paused a moment, and his restless hands fumbled the cover.

"Your first task, as I told you in the beginning, is to teach every negro
to stand erect in the presence of his former master and assert his
manhood. Unless he does this, the South will bristle with bayonets in
vain. The man who believes he is a dog, is one. The man who believes
himself a king, may become one. Stop this snivelling and sneaking round
the back doors. I can do nothing, God Almighty can do nothing, for a
coward. Fix this as the first law of your own life. Lift up your head! The
world is yours. Take it. Beat this into the skulls of your people, if you
do it with an axe. Teach them the military drill at once. I'll see that
Washington sends the guns. The state, when under your control, can furnish
the powder."

"It will surprise you to know the thoroughness with which this has been
done already by the League," said Lynch. "The white master believed he
could vote the negro as he worked him in the fields during the war. The
League, with its blue flaming altar, under the shadows of night, has
wrought a miracle. The negro is the enemy of his former master and will be
for all time."

"For the present," said the old man meditatively, "not a word to a living
soul as to my connection with this work. When the time is ripe, I'll show
my hand."

Elsie entered, protesting against her father's talking longer, and showed
Lynch to the door.

He paused on the moonlit porch and tried to engage her in familiar talk.

She cut him short, and he left reluctantly.

As he bowed his thick neck in pompous courtesy, she caught with a shiver
the odour of pomade on his black half-kinked hair. He stopped on the lower
step, looked back with smiling insolence, and gazed intently at her
beauty. The girl shrank from the gleam of the jungle in his eyes and
hurried within.

She found her father sunk in a stupor. Her cry brought the young surgeon
hurrying into the room, and at the end of an hour he said to Elsie and
Phil:

"He has had a stroke of paralysis. He may lie in mental darkness for
months and then recover. H