war was over. The struggle for autonomy and the inviolability of slavery, on the part of the South, was ended, an

ce shackles again upon hands which had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and at her request. So the slave was a slave no

trustee for their benefit. Regarded from the legal standpoint it was, indeed, a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded, penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless, nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions. Not a child might call upon a father fo

which looked ignorantly on the fruits of the deliverance it had wrought. The North did not comprehend its w

omplacency for many a generation. All at once it was perceived to be a great enormity that four millions of Christian people, in a Christian land, should dwell together without marriage rite or family tie. While they were slaves, the fact that they might be bo

mblies that met in the various States, after the

sband and wife in the days of slavery, might, upon application to an

a certain time should be liable to indict

constitute such parties husband and wife, as of the

fficer should be entitled to receive the sum o

o earn at once their living and the money for this fee, and when they had procured it walked a score of miles in order that they might be "registered," and, for the brief period that remained to them of life, know that the law had sanctioned the relation which years of love and suffering had sanctified. It was the first act of freedom, the first step of legal recognition or manly responsibility! It was a proud hour and a proud fact for the race which had so long been bowed in thralldom and forbidden even the most common though the holiest of God's ordinances. What the law had taken little by little, as the science of Christian slavery grew up under the brutality of our legal progress, the law returned in bulk. It was the first

been reared, the temple of justice was as strange to their feet, and the ways and forms of ordinary business as marvelous to their minds as the etiquette of the king's palace to a peasant who has only looked from afar upon its pinnacled roof. The recent statute had imposed upon the clerk a labor of no little difficulty because of this ver

man, whose clothing had a hint of the soldier in it, a

ancing up, but not intermittin

we wants to be marr

, you mean,

t, sah; we m

to get a license and be marrie

ard der w

iving together a

dat we hab, d

gistered. This is the p

s,

s hav

difficulty endeavored to make a selection; finally,

one-doll

five, but I c

nto his pockets, brought out some pieces of fractional currency and

up his pen and prepared to fill

's Nimbu

bus

es' Nimbus." "But you m

at fer twenty-odd years,

you wo

r mysel

hose land d

ds at de same place, I does. An' my name's Nimbus

our old mas

lonel Pote

ughingly, "from the durned outlandish name.

r his name? He nebber gib it ter me no

to argue with you. He

sah? I hain't got no lar

certificate that Nimbus and Lugena Desmit had been duly registered as husband and wife,

e put in dat

act is, a man can't be married ac

hould hev ole Mahs'r's name widout his gibb

ut that's the

'n I knows what ter do wid, jes' kase I's free. But d

othing to d

in't de law a doin dis ter

tain

hich is de lawful chillen ef

t. "That would have been a good idea, but, y

ster Clerk, couldn't you jes' put dat on dis

taking back the certificate; "

ls him Lone for short-he's gwine on fo'; dis yer gal Wicey, she's two past; and dis little brack cuss

er, with a short certificate that they were present, and were acknowledged

nto the "contraband" and mercenary soldier Georg