of no value whatever as a test of race.  It belongs with the grewsome superstition that a woman apparently white may give birth to a coal-black child by a white father.  Another instance that came under my eye was that of a very beautiful girl with soft, wavy brown hair, who is now living in a Far Western State as the wife of a white husband.  A typical case was that of a family in which the tradition of Negro origin had persisted long after all trace of it had disappeared.  The family took its origin from a white ancestress, and had consequently been free for several generations.  The father of the first colored child, counting the family in the female line—­the only way it could be counted—­was a mulatto.  A second infusion of white blood, this time on the paternal side, resulted in offspring not distinguishable from pure white.  One child of this generation emigrated to what was then the Far West, married a white woman and reared a large family, whose descendants, now in the fourth or fifth remove from the Negro, are in all probability wholly unaware of their origin.  A sister of this pioneer emigrant remained in the place of her birth and formed an irregular union with a white man of means, with whom she lived for many years and for whom she bore a large number of children, who became about evenly divided between white and colored, fixing their status by the marriages they made.  One of the daughters, for instance, married a white man and reared in a neighboring county a family of white children, who, in all probability, were as active as any one else in the recent ferocious red-shirt campaign to disfranchise the Negroes.

In this same town there was stationed once, before the war, at the Federal arsenal there located, an officer who fell in love with a “white Negro” girl, as our Southern friends impartially dub them.  This officer subsequently left the army, and carried away with him to the North the whole family of his inamorata.  He married the woman, and their descendants, who live in a large Western city, are not known at all as persons of color, and show no trace of their dark origin.

Two notable bishops of the Roman Catholic communion in the United States are known to be the sons of a slave mother and a white father, who, departing from the usual American rule, gave his sons freedom, education and a chance in life, instead of sending them to the auction block.  Colonel T.W.  Higginson, in his Cheerful Yesterdays, relates the story of a white colored woman whom he assisted in her escape from slavery or its consequences, who married a white man in the vicinity of Boston and lost her identity with the colored race.  How many others there must be who know of similar instances!  Grace King, in her “Story of New Orleans,” to which I have referred, in speaking of a Louisiana law which required the public records, when dealing with persons of color, always to specify the fact of color, in order, so far had the admixture of races gone, to distinguish them from whites, says:  “But the officers of the law could be bribed, and the qualification once dropped acted, inversely, as a patent of pure blood.”