Clarissa looked up into the face of her young mistress with a stare almost of vacuity, and after a moment's reflection said, with her accustomed pertness,
"I kaint hep dat, Miss Alice, ole marser dun und gin me my orders, und I want agwine ter let nobody pass nur repass ef I knoed it. Ole marser he noes his bizness, und ef he tells me ter keep de kyarpet-sackers outen dis grate house I'm ergwine ter do it ef de good Lawd spares me. Don't fault me, Miss Alice, wid ole marser's doins, fur de lan's sake. How cum dat dar jedge outen here any how? Dar aint no kote ergwine on in dis heer grate house dat I noes of. Specks dar is ergwine ter be wun do, und don't specks nuffin else but sumbodv is ergwine ter git conwicted und sont clean erway frum heer," and the old negro laughed boisterously. "Dat dar jedge is er portly man, but my king! dem dar eyes, ugh-h-h! cuts froo yu same ez er razor."
Alice laughed again and again at the old negro, and after awhile coyishly remarked, "Never mind, Clarissa, never mind."
Clarissa turned her old head to one side as she replied with great earnestness.
"Taint wurf while to say neber mind Clarsy, neber mind, I seed fo now what was agwine to be de upshot of dis bisniss. I knowed pine plank which er way de cat wuz er gwine to jump. Ole missus allus sed dat yu was ergwine to marry er jedge er a lyar er a mefodis slidin elder er a sircus rider und I hopes und prays dat yu may, kase ef yu don't youse ergwine ter be er lone lorn orfin creetur arter ole marser's hed dun und layed low."
The conversation of the distinguished gentleman naturally drifted into channels that had been cut very deep by the sharp edged tools of reconstruction; the judge deferentially yielding to his seniors who had witnessed the workmanship of unskilled hands, and what he ventured to say from time to time was in the way of suggestions or mild expostulations.
The Governor when discussing reconstruction was opinionated and emphatic. Every paragraph was punctuated with a sneer, gesture or frown.
"Had the suggestions of president Lincoln prevailed," he began, "the South would have been God's country; but wicked counsels predominated. There was not a statute enacted by a legislature, nor an order made by a general, nor a proclamation issued by a governor, nor a requisition made by the head of a department that did not whet the sword with which they were prodding into the bowels of the South, after the final capitulation. These atrocious policies were conceptions of men who swore in their wrath that not a blade of grass should spring where their hellish coursers planted hoof; that in the realigning of the federal union, strong black lines should be drawn with a savage vengeance over the face of the South. Reconstruction was the act of self-destruction, and the suicides deserve to be buried without the shedding of a tear, without christian sepulture in outlawed graves. They made the thorn to spring up where the fir-tree had flourished, and the bramble instead of the myrtle tree. In these abominable acts there is death; death enough to satisfy the grave. Before the ink was dry upon the parchment, before the funereal bake-meats were cold, they contract an unnatural covenant of marriage with four million slaves, disbanded outlaws from the army, and put upon them the mask of freedom to conceal the horrid front of tyranny. Sirs, we rebel against the outrage. When the Philistines are upon us shall we not rise and shake ourselves, or shall we lay our heads in the lap of Delilah, to be shorn of our power; to be bound in chains, until we shall pray God to avenge our wrongs in the common destruction of ourselves and our enemies. No sirs, they shall find that when we are prostrated, that like Antæus we shall rise with renewed vigor from our shame. Why this glozing title "Reconstruction?" Who shall declare its generation? What holy font was polluted by its baptism? Whence its bastard origin? Plots, the vile brood of malice have been hatched under fanatical incubation and piloted southward, like flocks of harpies, that by their uncleanness they might defile our civilization. Every blight of calumny from ultra partisan—press and pulpit, has been blown upon southern character. Their speeches are filled with fields scourged down to barrenness, and negroes multiplied and worked up to the very tragedy of indiscriminate assassinations. We will not propitiate the black devils by heaping their altars with sacrifices; black fiends who, like the great dragon in the Apocalypse, are sweeping after them into the abysm, filled with slaughter, one third of the stars in our political heaven. Which of these stars are to be fixed, or which are to be planetary in this black firmament of eternal night; which primary, and which central, which wandering stars and which satellites, are matters for their savage taste. For my state may God in his infinite mercy decree that the laws of position and movement may be ascertained and established, before it, once so beautiful and bright, shall go down and down forever below a horizon of blood. They may like wrestlers in the arena bring us to our knees, but never sir, shall they lay us on our backs. Let us alone, and the dews and the rains and the sunshine of heaven, (the only creatures of God left by them in friendship with us) shall give to our blood-stained fields moisture and fertility, and time and labor and God's blessing shall cover the land with verdure, with cottonfields and gardens, pastures and meadows. They promised us peace, and it came with the mutterings of a tornado. In our vain efforts to compromise the situation we turned our backs upon the past, hallowed as were its memories. We had ceased to remember the execrations of fanatics, even the 'league with the devil, and the covenant with hell.'
"We did all this and more, after we had passed fire-scathed through an ordeal whose voice was storm and whose movement was earthquake, which swept from us every visible substance; so that in our last and extremest agony we were forced to cry aloud, like Francis at Pavia, "All is lost save honor." We gave the government our parole; we hammered our swords into plow-shares and pruning-hooks; we pitched our tents upon the fire-blasted lands where once had been our homes, and with axe and mattock and blade and plow began to cut away brambles and bushes and cultivate our fields; and when we believed that we were secure in the enjoyment of our rights of persons and property, the authors of reconstruction swept down upon the beleaguered South like Hyder Ali upon the Carnatic, and left scarcely a vestige upon which to hope, or from which to rebuild, except our worn-out lands and our own splendid manhood and womanhood. States were despoiled of their resources, towns and cities were battered and burned; the angel of death had crossed every threshhold, and three hundred thousand of the flower and chivalry of the land were lying in soldiers' graves. Our public institutions were languishing unto death; from centre to circumference there were outlawries, assassinations, conflagrations; and our people looked into the faces of each other and in their helplessness asked what other calamities are reserved for us and our children. They seized upon four million slaves and hurled them like immense projectiles against our civilization. And to conclude, sir, for I find I am getting excited, in this catastrophe our hopes were stayed upon the honest men of the North, like you, sir, and our noble, patriotic women, like you, my dear miss," bowing with boyish gallantry to Alice. "The women of the sixties are more than heroines in the storm-swept crisis—they are a revelation in the flesh. What Arria was to Pætus, what Natalia was to Adrian, what Gertrude was to Rudolph, what Helen, the Jennie Dean of the 'Heart of Midlothian,' was to Tibbie, what Prascovia was to the Russian exile, our self-sacrificing women are to us. There has never been an occasion when the habit of instantaneous obedience to the voice of love and country has produced more affecting and constant instances of devotion and loyalty upon the part of the women, than in the gleaning of the aftermath by hands saturated with all the crimes of the calendar.
"And now, gentlemen," (the Governor bowed), "if I have given offence by any intemperate expression, will you please forgive me, for my wrath waxes warm when concentrated upon the subject of reconstruction. Perhaps, sir," he continued, addressing His Honor, "you are not in sympathy with the views I may have inconsiderately expressed?"