“My dear, dear, heart-broken mama:—­

“I am in the hands of God.  Whatever He does is just, is right, is the only thing to be done.  Knowing this, do not grieve after me.  Take poor Bernard for your son and love him as you did me.  I make that as my sole dying request of you.  One long sweet clinging kiss ere I drop into the ocean of death to be lost in its tossing waves.

      “Viola.”

    “Beloved Papa:—­

“Your little daughter is gone.  Her heart, though torn, bleeding, dead, gave, as it were, an after throb of pain as it thought of you.  In life you never denied me a request.  I have one to make from my grave, knowing that you will not deny me.  Love Bernard as your son; draw him to you, so that, when in your old age you go tottering to your tomb in quest of me, you may have a son to bear you up.  Take my lifeless body on your knee and kiss me as you did of old.  It will help me to rest sweetly in my grave.

      “Your little Vie.”

    “Dear Bernard:—­

“Viola has loved and left you.  Unto you, above all others, I owe a full explanation of the deed which I have committed; and I shall therefore lay bare my heart to you.  My father was a colonel in the Civil War and when I was very young he would make my little heart thrill with patriotic fervor as he told me of the deeds of daring of the gallant Negro soldiers.  As a result, when nothing but a tiny girl, I determined to be a heroine and find some outlet for my patriotic feeling.  This became a consuming passion.  In 18—­ just two years prior to my meeting you, a book entitled, ’White Supremacy and Negro Subordination,’ by the merest accident came into my possession.  That book made a revelation to me of a most startling nature.

“While I lived I could not tell you what I am about to tell you.  Death has brought me the privilege.  That book proved to me that the intermingling of the races in sexual relationship was sapping the vitality of the Negro race and, in fact, was slowly but surely exterminating the race.  It demonstrated that the fourth generation of the children born of intermarrying mulattoes were invariably sterile or woefully lacking in vital force.  It asserted that only in the most rare instances were children born of this fourth generation and in no case did such children reach maturity.  This is a startling revelation.  While this intermingling was impairing the vital force of our race and exterminating it, it was having no such effect on the white race for the following reason.  Every half-breed, or for that, every person having a tinge of Negro blood, the white people cast off.  We receive the cast off with open arms and he comes to us with his devitalizing power.  Thus, the white man was slowly exterminating us and our total extinction was but a short period of time distant.  I looked out upon our strong,