tender hearted, manly race being swept from the face of the earth by immorality, and the very marrow in my bones seemed chilled at the thought thereof.  I determined to spend my life fighting the evil.  My first step was to solemnly pledge God to never marry a mulatto man.  My next resolve was to part in every honorable way all courting couples of mulatto people that I could.  My other and greatest task was to persuade the evil women of my race to cease their criminal conduct with white men and I went about pleading with them upon my knees to desist.  I pointed out that such a course was wrong before God and was rapidly destroying the Negro race.  I told them of my resolve to never marry a mulatto man.  Many had faith in me and I was the means of redeeming numbers of these erring ones.  When you came, I loved you.  I struggled hard against that love.  God, alone, knows how I battled against it.  I prayed Him to take it from me, as it was eating my heart away.  Sometimes I would appear indifferent to you with the hope of driving you away, but then my love would come surging with all the more violence and sweep me from my feet.  At last, you seemed to draw away from me and I was happy.  I felt free to you.  But you at last proposed to me when I thought all such notions were dead.  At once I foresaw my tragic end.  My heart shed bloody tears, weeping over my own sad end, weeping for my beloved parents, weeping for my noble Bernard who was so true, so noble, so great in all things.

“Bernard, how happy would I have been, how deliriously happy, could I but have stood beside you at the altar and sworn fidelity to you.  Ours would have been an ideal home.  But it was not to be.  I had to choose between you and my race.  Your noble heart, in its sober moments will sanction my choice, I would not have died if I could have lived without proving false to my race.  Had I lived, my love and your agony, which I cannot bear, would have made me prove false to every vow.

“Dear Bernard, I have a favor to ask of you.  Secure the book of which I spoke to you.  Study the question of the intermingling of the races.  If miscegenation is in reality destroying us, dedicate your soul to the work of separating the white and colored races.  Do not let them intermingle.  Erect moral barriers to separate them.  If you fail in this, make the separation physical; lead our people forth from this accursed land.  Do this and I shall not have died in vain.  Visit my grave now and then to drop thereon a flower and a flag, but no tears.  If in the shadowy beyond, whose mists I feel gathering about me, there is a place where kindred spirits meet, you and I shall surely meet again.  Though I could not in life, I will in death sign myself,

    “Your loving wife,

      “Viola Belgrave.”

Let us not enter this saddened home when the seals of those letters were broken.  Let us not break the solemn silence of those who bowed their heads and bore the grief, too poignant for words.  Dropping a tear of regret on the little darling who failed to remember that we have one atonement for all mankind and that further sacrifice was therefore needless, we pass out and leave the loving ones alone with their dead.