en made supreme by the indignities
he had suffered, and he felt sure of his ability to accomplish results.
Every county in the State was represented by its best men in this
gathering at the Capitol.

The day he undertook to present his memorial to the Legislature was one he
never forgot. The streets were crowded with negroes who had come to town
to hear Lynch, the Lieutenant-Governor, speak in a mass-meeting. Negro
policemen swung their clubs in his face as he pressed through the insolent
throng up the street to the stately marble Capitol. At the door a black,
greasy trooper stopped him to parley. Every decently dressed white man was
regarded a spy.

As he passed inside the doors of the House of Representatives the rush of
foul air staggered him. The reek of vile cigars and stale whiskey, mingled
with the odour of perspiring negroes, was overwhelming. He paused and
gasped for breath.

The space behind the seats of the members was strewn with corks, broken
glass, stale crusts, greasy pieces of paper, and picked bones. The hall
was packed with negroes, smoking, chewing, jabbering, pushing,
perspiring.

A carpet-bagger at his elbow was explaining to an old darkey from down
east why his forty acres and a mule hadn't come.

On the other side of him a big negro bawled:

"Dat's all right! De cullud man on top!"

The doctor surveyed the hall in dismay. At first not a white member was
visible. The galleries were packed with negroes. The Speaker presiding was
a negro, the Clerk a negro, the doorkeepers negroes, the little pages all
coal-black negroes, the Chaplain a negro. The negro party consisted of one
hundred and one--ninety-four blacks and seven scallawags, who claimed to
be white. The remains of Aryan civilization were represented by
twenty-three white men from the Scotch-Irish hill counties.

The doctor had served three terms as the member from Ulster in this hall
in the old days, and its appearance now was beyond any conceivable depth
of degradation.

The ninety-four Africans, constituting almost its solid membership, were a
motley crew. Every negro type was there, from the genteel butler to the
clodhopper from the cotton and rice fields. Some had on second-hand seedy
frock-coats their old master had given them before the war, glossy and
threadbare. Old stovepipe hats, of every style in vogue since Noah came
out of the ark, were placed conspicuously on the desks or cocked on the
backs of the heads of the honour