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 seal which was put on the slave's manhood—the first step upward from the brutishness of another's possession to the glory of independence. The race felt its importance as did no one else at that time. By hundreds and thousands they crowded the places appointed, to accept the honor offered to their posterity, and thereby unwittingly conferred undying honor upon themselves. Few indeed were the unworthy ones who evaded the sacred responsibility thus laid upon them, and left their offspring to remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless. The distance from zero to unity is always infinity.
The county clerk in and for the county of Horsford sat behind the low wooden railing which he had been compelled to put across his office to protect him from the too near approach of those who crowded to this fountain of rehabilitating honor that had recently been opened therein. Unused to anything beyond the plantation on which they had 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 very ignorance on the part of those whom he was required to serve; but he was well rewarded. The clerk was a man of portly presence, given to his ease, who smoked a long-stemmed pipe as he sat beside a table which, in addition to his papers and writing materials, held a bucket of water on which floated a clean gourd, in easy reach of his hand.
"Be you the clerk, sail?" said a straight young colored man, whose clothing had a hint of the soldier in it, as well as his respectful but unusually collected bearing.
"Yes," said the clerk, just glancing up, but not intermitting his work; "what do you want?"
"If you please, sah, we wants to be married, Lugena and me."
"Registered, you mean, I suppose?"
"No, we don't, sah; we means married."
"I can't marry you. You'll have to get a license and be married by a magistrate or a minister."
"But I heard der was a law—"
"Have you been living together as man and wife?"
"Oh, yes, sah; dat we hab, dis smart while."
"Then you want to be registered. This is the place. Got a half-dollar?"
"Yes, sah?"
"Let's have it."
The colored man took out some bills, and with much difficulty endeavored to make a selection; finally, handing one doubtfully toward the clerk, he asked,
"Is dat a one-dollah, sah?"
"No, that is a five, but I can change it."
"No, I'se got it h'yer," said the other hastily, as he dove again into his pockets, brought out some pieces of fractional currency and handed them one by one to the officer until he said he had enough.
"Well," said the clerk as he took up his pen and prepared to fill out the blank, "what is your name?"
"My name's Nimbus, sah."
"Nimbus what?"
"Nimbus nuffin', sah; jes' Nimbus." "But you must have another name?"
"No I hain't. Jes' wore dat fer twenty-odd years, an' nebber hed no udder."
"Who do you work for?"
"Wuk for myself, sah."
"Well, on whose land do you work?"
"Wuks on my own, sah. Oh, I libs at home an' boa'ds at de same place, I does. An' my name's Nimbus, jes' straight along, widout any tail ner handle."
"What was your old master's name?"
"Desmit—Colonel Potem Desmit."
"I might have known that," said the clerk laughingly, "from the durned outlandish name. Well, Desmit is your surname, then, ain't it?"
"No'taint, Mister. What right I got ter his name? He nebber gib it ter me no more'n he did ter you er Lugena h'yer."
"Pshaw, I can't stop to argue with you. Here's your certificate."
"Will you please read it, sah? I hain't got no larnin'. Ef you please, sah."
The clerk, knowing it to be the quickest way to get rid of them, read rapidly over the certificate that Nimbus and Lugena Desmit had been duly registered as husband and wife, under the provisions of an ordinance of the Convention ratified on the—day of—, 1865.
"So you's done put in dat name—Desmit?"
"Oh, I just had to, Nimbus. The fact is, a man can't be married according to law without two names."
"So hit appears; but ain't it quare dat I should hev ole Mahs'r's name widout his gibbin' it ter me, ner my axin' fer it, Mister?"
"It may be, but that's the way, you see."
"So hit seems. 'Pears like I'm boun' ter hev mo' names 'n I knows what ter do wid, jes' kase I's free. But de chillen—yer hain't sed nary word about dem, Mister."
"Oh, I've nothing to do with them."
"But, see h'yer, Mister, ain't de law a doin dis ter make dem lawful chillen?"
"Certainly."
"An' how's de law ter know which is de lawful chillen ef hit ain't on dat ar paper?"
"Sure enough," said the clerk, with amusement. "That would have been a good idea, but, you see, Nimbus, the law didn't go that far."
"Wal, hit ought ter hev gone dat fur. Now, Mister Clerk, couldn't you jes' put dat on dis yer paper, jes' ter "commodate me, yer know."
"Perhaps so," good-naturedly, taking back the certificate; "what do you want me to write?"
"Wal, yer see, dese yer is our chillen. Dis yer boy Lone—Axylone, Marse Desmit called him, but we calls him Lone for short—he's gwine on fo'; dis yer gal Wicey, she's two past; and dis little brack cuss Lugena's a-holdin' on, we call Cap'n, kase he bosses all on us—he's nigh 'bout a year; an' dat's all."
The clerk entered the names and ages of the children on the back of the paper, with a short certificate that they were present, and were acknowledged as the children, and the only ones, of the parties named in the instrument.
And so the slave Nimbus was transformed, first into the "contraband" and mercenary soldier George Nimbus, and then by marriage into Nimbus Desmit.
CHAPTER VI.
THE TOGA VIRILIS.
But the transformations of the slave were not yet ended. The time came when he was permitted to become a citizen. For two years he had led an inchoate, nondescript sort of existence: free without power or right; neither slave nor freeman; neither property nor citizen. He had been, meanwhile, a bone of contention between the Provisional Governments of the States and the military power which controlled them. The so-called State Governments dragged him toward the whipping-post and the Black Codes and serfdom. They denied him his oath, fastened him to the land, compelled