Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/364

 The Preacher was silent a moment and seemed to be musing in a sort of half dream. The deacon looked at him with a growing sense of the hopelessness of his task, but of surprise at this revelation of the secrets of his inner life.

"The South has been voiceless in these later years," he went on, "her voice has been drowned in a din of cat-calls from an army of cheap scribblers and demagogues. But when these children we are rearing down here grow, rocked in their cradles of poverty, nurtured in the fierce struggle to save the life of a mighty race, they will find speech, and their songs will fill the world with pathos and power.

"I've studied your great cities. Believe me the South is worth saving. Against the possible day when a flood of foreign anarchy threatens the foundations of the Republic and men shall laugh at the faiths of your fathers, and undigested wealth beyond the dreams of avarice rots your society, until it mocks at honour, love and God—against that day we will preserve the South!"

The Preacher's voice was now vibrating with deep feeling, and the deacon listened with breathless interest.

"Believe me, deacon, the ark of the covenant of American ideals rests to-day on the Appalachian Mountain range of the South. When your metropolitan mobs shall knock at the doors of your life and demand the reason of your existence, from these poverty-stricken homes, with their old-fashioned, perhaps mediaeval ideas, will come forth the fierce athletic sons and sweet-voiced daughters in whom the nation will find a new birth!" The Preacher's eyes had filled with tears and his voice dropped into a low dream-like prophecy.

"You can not understand," he resumed, in a clear voice, "why I feel so profoundly depressed just now because the Republican party, which, with you stands for