The Fairfield Herald

The whole Western country is all agog over this mysterious order which it is stated, has arisen as if in a night and overspread large sections of the West, exhibiting however, a marked partiality for Parson Brownlow's plotonic regions. It seems to have inspired a genuine awe and terror, and the press of that section is discussing voluminously such questions as there, Who they are and what they are. Whence they come and whither they go,--their purposes, objects, &c. &c.

The Klan professes to be a mixed company of the living and the dead--banded together for a common purpose, and wreaking vengeance, swift and sure, upon enemies. They move in the witching hours of night in fantastic guise--like phantoms in ghostly processions and promulgate orders in a mystical and weird jargon that seems borrowed from the lower regions. Here is what a paper says of them. We hardly know whether the editor is a wag and poking fun at the country or is narrating the apparitions of a night-mare.

He is describing how some one beheld a ghostly band of mysterious horsemen clad in cerement of white, mounted upon pale gray horses, shod with felt, and one bearing on high a spotless banner inscribed in characters of vivid flame with the appalling word "Revenge!" Not a sound was heard as the ghostly band moved steadily through the street, no clinkling of scabbard and jingling of spurs resounded upon the still morning air, no foot-fall fell upon the startled ears of the bewildered loyalists; but silently and calmly as though moving in air, that awesome band went on--on through the street, to the bluff at the river, and over it, marching then as steadily through the thin air to the further side, and then, just as the first red streaks of dawn were visible in the East, the whole squadron vanished suddenly, and the white banner faded away from sight.

The whole fact seems to be that it is a move on the part of the Conservatives of that section, to counteract the persecution, usurpation and violence, with which radical enmity has pursued them, the retaliation that follows injury--violence begotten of violence. The means may be questionable; but it is the fruit of radical oppression.