He had jest got it started, and had fifty pupils—grown people and children of the freedmen—when some ruffians come one stormy night and set it on fire.
The white prejudice wuz so strong aginst havin’ the colored race taught, that they burned down the buildings, destroyed all the property that that good man had spent there.
It wuz on a cold, stormy night. His wife wuz ill in bed when the fire broke out; the fright and exposure of that night killed her.
Not a white man dast open his door to take the family in, though the white Baptist preacher at Wyandotte, when he hearn on it, he jest riz right up in his pulpit the next Sunday night, mad with a holy wrath at what had been done in their midst.
He riz right up and told his flock right to their faces what he thought of such doin’s.
They said he stood there with his handsome head throwed back, and sez he, brave as a lion (and fur better-lookin’), sez he:
“Such outrages are a shame to humanity. Men war against principles and issues, not against helpless women and children;” and sez he, “If they had fled to me for safety, I would have opened my doors and taken them in.”
Oh, how they glared at him, and how the threatenin’, scowlin’ faces seemed to close round him, and his wife’s heart almost stopped beatin’; she could fairly hear the report of the pistol-shot and feel the sharp knife of the assassin.
When all to once his little girl, only three years old, who had come to church that night, she see the black looks and heard the muttered threats aginst her papa. And she slipped down unnoticed and come up to him, and pressed up close aginst him, and tried to creep up into his arms as if she wanted to protect him, the pretty creeter.
He sez, “Hush, darling, you mustn’t come to papa.”