renegades and turn-coats. Then, too, and worst of all, they got rich
in a single night and took beautiful homes from dear Prestons and
lived in them themselves. The beloved Prestons, so nobly proud in
their fallen fortunes,--so right and proper in their politics,--had
once owned all the lovely grounds alongside the bald yard that
inclosed the child's own hired house; grounds where peacocks were as
much at home as in story-books--peacocks with tails more ravishing
than fly-brushes; where magnolia-trees flung down big scented petals
as fascinating as sheets of letter-paper, and tall poplars stood like
angels with half-closed wings against the sky. And with her own
tear-filled eyes Hope Carolina had seen the exiled ones depart from
this paradise crying, ah, so bitterly; turning back, as the breaking
heart turns, for long, last, kissing looks. And now the Radical Judge
lived there--the bad Radical Judge _who went locked-arms with
niggers_; lived there with the wife who took things to forget, and the
little crippled child who had never walked in her life because
somebody had let her fall long ago.

[Illustration: "AN UNTIDY MIDGET FOLLOWING CLOSELY AT HIS HEELS"]

Hope Carolina could never go over again and make brown writing marks
on the sweet magnolia petals. She could never steal suddenly through
the boxwood hedge which hid the paling fence at that side of the hired
yard, and frighten the peacocks so that they would spread their tails
proudly. Everything belonged to the Radical Judge, even the old yellow
satin sofas in the parlor, on which negroes sat now. And besides, no
matter how poor they were, Democrat families never had anything to do
with Radical families. They only threw "rocks" at them--safely from
behind fences.