“I am glad you are prospering.  You were better equipped than I was with a deal of materialism and a dearth of ideals.  Give us a line when you are in good heart.

    “Yours, Halliday.

“P.S.—­Just as I finished writing I had a note from Judge Featherton offering me the court messengership at five dollars a week.  I am twenty-five.  The place was held before by a white boy of fifteen.  I declined.  ‘Southward Ho!’”

Davis was not without sympathy as he read his friend’s letter in a city some distance away.  He had worked in a hotel, saved money enough to start a barber-shop and was prospering.  His white customers joked with him and patted him on the back, and he was already known to have political influence.  Yes, he sympathized with Bert, but he laughed over the letter and jingled the coins in his pockets.

“Thank heaven,” he said, “that I have no ideals to be knocked into a cocked hat.  A colored man has no business with ideals—­not in this nineteenth century!”

JIM’S PROBATION

For so long a time had Jim been known as the hardest sinner on the plantation that no one had tried to reach the heart under his outward shell even in camp-meeting and revival times.  Even good old Brother Parker, who was ever looking after the lost and straying sheep, gave him up as beyond recall.

“Dat Jim,” he said, “Oomph, de debbil done got his stamp on dat boy, an’ dey ain’ no use in tryin’ to scratch hit off.”

“But Parker,” said his master, “that’s the very sort of man you want to save.  Don’t you know it’s your business as a man of the gospel to call sinners to repentance?”

“Lawd, Mas’ Mordaunt,” exclaimed the old man, “my v’ice done got hoa’se callin’ Jim, too long ergo to talk erbout.  You jes’ got to let him go ‘long, maybe some o’ dese days he gwine slip up on de gospel an’ fall plum’ inter salvation.”

Even Mandy, Jim’s wife, had attempted to urge the old man to some more active efforts in her husband’s behalf.  She was a pillar of the church herself, and was woefully disturbed about the condition of Jim’s soul.  Indeed, it was said that half of the time it was Mandy’s prayers and exhortations that drove Jim into the woods with his dog and his axe, or an old gun that he had come into possession of from one of the younger Mordaunts.

Jim was unregenerate.  He was a fighter, a hard drinker, fiddled on Sunday, and had been known to go out hunting on that sacred day.  So it startled the whole place when Mandy announced one day to a few of her intimate friends that she believed “Jim was under conviction.”  He had stolen out hunting one Sunday night and in passing through the swamp had gotten himself thoroughly wet and chilled, and this had brought on an attack of acute rheumatism, which Mandy had pointed out to him as a direct judgment of heaven.  Jim scoffed at first, but Mandy grew more and more earnest, and finally, with the racking of the pain, he waxed serious and determined to look to the state of his soul as a means to the good of his body.