perspiring negroes, was overwhelming. He paused and gasped for breath.
The space behind the seats of the members was strewn with corks, broken glass, stale crusts, greasy pieces of paper, and picked bones. The hall was packed with negroes, smoking, chewing, jabbering, pushing, perspiring.
A carpet-bagger at his elbow was explaining to an old darkey from down east why his forty acres and a mule hadn't come.
On the other side of him a big negro bawled:
"Dat's all right! De cullud man on top!"
The doctor surveyed the hall in dismay. At first not a white member was visible. The galleries were packed with negroes. The Speaker presiding was a negro, the Clerk a negro, the doorkeepers negroes, the little pages all coal-black negroes, the Chaplain a negro. The negro party consisted of one hundred and one—ninety-four blacks and seven scallawags, who claimed to be white. The remains of Aryan civilisation were represented by twenty-three white men from the Scotch-Irish hill counties.
The doctor had served three terms as the member from Ulster in this hall in the old days, and its appearance now was beyond any conceivable depth of degradation.
The ninety-four Africans, constituting almost its solid membership, were a motley crew. Every negro type was there, from the genteel butler to the clodhopper from the cotton and rice fields. Some had on second-hand seedy frock-coats their old masters had given them before the war, glossy and threadbare. Old stovepipe hats, of every style in vogue since Noah came out of the
