total ignorance of the awful menace of color made even the best people unsympathetic with the fearful struggle the whites in the Southland were waging for the very existence of the Anglo-Saxon race. He determined to turn the conversation back to its former agreeable channel.

"So you expect to become a member of our church while you are in Dothan?" he said after a brief pause. "Yes, if you will have me."

"I welcome you right here and now," said the minister, reaching out his hand heartily. "We can arrange to receive you publicly next Sabbath. I expect you have your church letter with you."

All this time the young Waynor girl, a miss of about fifteen years of age, had been amusing herself looking at an illustrated magazine. She had heard the conversation, but had taken no part in it whatever until just now, when she heard Miss Atkinson say: "Auntie told me it would be of no use to bring my church letter or I should have brought it with me from Pittsburg, but I can write for it at once. I wonder what made auntie think you did not want me for a church member?"

"I think, cousin," said the Waynor miss innocently, "it was because you were going to teach at the Harbison Institute."

"What!" It was Mr. Durham who almost shouted out this word. The color had left his face and he was pale as death. His teeth came together like a steel trap. His eyes stared madly. He clenched his hands and fell back in his chair, as horrified as Macbeth was at the apparition of Banquo's ghost.

Rose Atkinson was frightened. She was sure the good minister had suddenly been stricken with a paroxysm of pain or a stroke of apoplexy.

"What is the matter, Mr. Durham?" she asked excitedly.

The minister began to recover himself, but he did not speak for a few moments. His breathing came heavily and he seemed utterly exhausted. Finally, after a tense silence, he turned to Rose with a look of pathos in his eyes which she never forgot, and said plaintively, "It is not true, is it?"

"What is not true?" she inquired in amazement.

It is not true what your cousin has just said, that you are going to teach in the Harbison Institute, and throw your life away on those niggers." The last word was hissed out contemptuously.

Now was the time for Rose Atkinson to make a startling discovery. This awful change of manner, which made the minister an altogether different man, had come over him the moment he knew she was about to lend a hand to help lift up a prostrate race. She saw it all in a flash like lightning, and she was almost blinded by the revelation. Very evidently Mr. Durham had been entirely ignorant of her purpose in coming to Dothan or she would have met with a very different reception from him. John Durham, of Hambright, and William Durham, of Dothan, were brothers in spirit if not in appearance. She was disappointed, bitterly disappointed. The sermon of the previous day had thrilled her soul and lifted up her hopes. She had believed that Mr. Durham knew all the time she was expecting to devote her life to the work of Harbison Institute, and she was delighted that her aunt's pastor had received her so favorably in spite of this fact. But now all her dreams of Christian fellowship in his church were ended. She knew well from his manner that to teach in Harbison Institute was, in his eyes, a crime against the Southland and the whole

'Anglo-Saxon race. Mr. Durham also could see that she, as well as himself, had been misled, and that now she was beginning to understand his position toward her work on behalf of the negro.

He watched her expression of surprise change to one of dismay, as she realized her isolation and his feelings toward her purpose to assist a despised race. She, too, became pale, her frame shook, tears sprang to her eyes, and in another moment she was sobbing convulsively.

This was too much for Mr. Durham. He was a Southern gentleman. A lady in tears melted him as snow melts beneath the warm Alabama sun.

"My poor girl!" he said, rising, and going over to where she sat, "I am sorry I have been compelled to grieve you."

"I had hoped from your sermon to find you so different," she sobbed.

"If you had lived as long in the South as I have you would feel exactly as I do," he answered with assurance.

Rose did not reply for a few moments, but sought to calm herself, and regain her self-control. She dried her tears.

"Mr. Durham," she began, "yesterday you urged your people to spread the Gospel over the world so that humanity might become one brotherhood. Is the negro in 'Africa to become our brother, while the negro in America is classed with the brutes?"

"My dear Miss Atkinson," responded Mr. Durham with less heat than he had ever before discussed the negro question, "you do not understand. None of the Northern Christians understand our awful problem in the South. What your schools for Freedmen,' as you call them, really teach is an impossible social equality between

us and a race which came but yesterday from the savagery of the African jungles. You are trying to force on the South an impossible social order that will bring blood and ruin on our children."

"Listen to me, Mr. Durham," replied the girl, sitting up straight and looking him full in the eye: "If Christ came into your Southland to-day would he not befriend the African just as he did the despised Samaritan at the well of Sychar? Would he close his ears to the cry of the poor blacks, so horribly wronged during two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil, as they ask for a chance to make the most of the lives that God has given them? Would Christ turn furious because he knew that I was giving up a life of luxury and ease to help educate the head, heart and hand of ignorant negroes? No, sir. He would say to me, in tenderest sympathy: 'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of these, the least of all my brethren, you have done it unto me.' Mr. Durham," and the girl spoke with terrible earnestness, “you are not Christ's representative in Dothan in the spirit you show to the poor, unfortunate, ignorant African at your door."

"But my dear girl," protested the minister, rather awed by her vehemence, "you forget the awful menace of social equality and what that means to our whole Anglo-Saxon race. Do you not see that you are a child playing with matches in a powder factory?"

The girl looked earnestly at the minister. His look of passion had been replaced by his habitual glance of thoughtful kindliness.

"I think I am beginning to understand now what is the matter in your case, sir," she said slowly. “You think, don't you, Mr. Durham, that to elevate the negro is to risk a mulatto citizenship in America."

66

Precisely," responded the other quickly.

Rose Atkinson stood up and faced the pastor of Calvary Church. Her eyes sparkled like diamonds, her cheeks were flushed, her ruby lips trembled a moment, and then she began to speak with an intensity that thrilled her listener.

"You are wrong, Mr. Durham, absolutely and most assuredly wrong. A mulatto citizenship will come a great deal sooner from your present method of holding down the negro in his primitive ignorance and degradation, for by doing this you are lowering the white race, and all history proves that white and black mix on the lower not on the higher levels. Let the white man ennoble himself by seeking to lift up the weaker race and the two races will become, as Booker T. Washington has said, 'as separate as the fingers in all matters purely social, but one, as the hand, in all things essential to mutual progress.' Unless you are converted to Christ's principles on the race problem, Mr. Durham, you are a positive factor, and so is your brother in Hambright, in bringing the curse of mulattoism to the beautiful Southland."

And she passed out, leaving Rev. William Durham pondering over new, strange thoughts.

An hour later he was still sitting as she had left him, his head bowed in his hands. There had come to his mind a picture of a wounded, half-dead negro whom he had ignored a few days before, and as he thought of it he recalled an old story about a wounded man who lay on the roadside between Jerusalem and Jericho. A tear came to his eye. He remembered Rose Atkinson's words: "You are not Christ's representative in Dothan in the spirit you show to the unfortunate African at your 'door."