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 now to de bend er de creek whar I done pick out my forty acres?"

"We will, if you have the needful for the ceremony. The fee for the surveyor is small—only two dollars for each stake. We have no time to linger with foolish virgins who have no oil in their lamps. The bride groom has come. They who have no oil must remain in outer darkness." The speaker had evidently been a preacher in the North, and his sacred accent sealed his authority with the old negro, who had been an exhorter himself.

Aleck felt in his pocket the jingle of twenty gold dollars the initiation fees of the week's harvest of the League. He drew them, counted out eight, and took his four stakes The surveyors kindly showed him how to drive them down firmly to the first stripe of blue. When they had stepped off a square of about forty acres of the Lenoir farm, including the richest piece of bottom land on the creek, which Aleck's children under his wife's direction were working for Mrs. Lenoir, and the four stakes were planted, old Aleck shouted:

"Glory ter God!"

"Now," said the foremost surveyor, "you want a deed—a deed in fee simple with the big seal of the Government on it, and you're fixed for life. The deed you can take to the court-house and make the clerk record it."

The man drew from his pocket an official-looking paper, with a red circular seal pasted on its face.

Uncle Aleck's eyes danced.

"Is dat de deed?"