"For the Lord\'s sake, Jennie—"

Dick Welford paused at the bottom of a range of steps which wound up the capitol hill from Pennsylvania Avenue.

The girl standing at the top stamped her foot imperiously.

"Hurry—hurry!"

"I won\'t—"

"Then I\'ll leave you!"

The boy laughed.

"You don\'t dare. It\'s barely sunup—still dark in spots—the boogers\'ll get you—"

With a grin he deliberately sat down.

"Dick Welford, you\'re the laziest white man I ever saw in my life—We won\'t get a seat, I tell you—"

"We can stand up."

"We won\'t even get our noses in the door—"

"You don\'t think these old Senators get up at daylight, do you?"

"They didn\'t go to bed last night—"

"I\'ll bet they didn\'t!" Dick laughed.

"I know one that didn\'t anyhow—"

"Who?"

"Senator Davis."

"How do you know?"

"Spent the night there. Father stayed so late, Mrs. Davis put me to bed. Regular procession all night long! And among his visitors the Blackest Republican of them all—"

"Old Abe run over from Illinois to say good-by?"

"No, but his right hand man Seward did—"

"Sly old snuff-dipping hypocrite—"

"Anyhow, he\'s the brains of his party."

"And he called on Jeff Davis last night?"

"Not the first time either. Mrs. Davis told me that when the Senator was so ill with neuralgia and came near losing his sight, Seward came every day, sat in the darkened room and talked for hours to his enemy—"

"That\'s because he\'s a Black Republican. Their ways are dark. They like rooms with the shades pulled down—"

"Anyhow he likes Mr. Davis."

"Well, it\'s good-by to the old union—how many Senators are going to-day?"

"Yulee and Mallory from Florida, Clay and Fitzpatrick from Alabama and Senator Davis—"

"All in a day?"

"Yes—"

"Jennie, they\'ll talk their heads off. It\'ll be three o\'clock before the first one finishes. We\'ll die. Let\'s go to Mt. Vernon—"

"Dick Welford, I\'m ashamed of you. You\'ve no patriotism at all—"

"And I just proposed a pilgrimage to the home of George Washington!"

"You don\'t care what happens in the Senate Chamber to-day—"

"No—I don\'t."

The boy\'s lazy figure slowly rose, mounted the steps, paused and looked down into the tense eager young face.

"You really want to know," he began slowly, "why speaking tires me now?"

"Yes—why?"

"Because it\'s a waste of breath—we\'re going to fight!"

The girl flushed with excitement.

"Who told you? What have you heard? Who said so?"

A dreamy look in the boy\'s eyes deepened.

"Nobody\'s told me. I just know. It\'s in the air. A wild duck knows when to go north. A bluebird knows when to move south. It\'s in the air. That\'s the way I know—" his voice dropped. "Let\'s go to Mt. Vernon and spend the day, Jennie—"

The girl looked up sharply. The low persuasive tones were unmistakable.

The faintest flush mantled her cheeks.

"No—I wouldn\'t miss those speeches for anything. You promised to take me to the Senate gallery. Come on."

With a quick bound the boy scaled the next flight of steps and looked down at her laughing:

"All right, why don\'t you come on!"

With a frown she sprang up the stone stairs and he caught her step with a sudden military salute. They walked in silence for a few minutes.

"What\'s the matter with you to-day, Dick Welford?"

"Why, Miss Jennie Barton?"

"I never saw you quite so foolish."

"Maybe it\'s because I never saw you quite so pretty—"

The little figure stiffened with dignity.

"That will do now, sir—"

"Yessum!"

She threw him a look of quiet scorn as they picked their way through the piles of building material for the unfinished dome of the Capitol and mounted the steps.

Barely half past seven o\'clock and the crowds were pouring into the Senate Chamber, its cloak rooms and galleries. Within thirty minutes after they had found seats opposite the diplomatic gallery every inch of space in the great hall was jammed and packed.

Southern women and their escorts outnumbered the others five to one. The Southern wing of official Washington was out in force.

The tense electric atmosphere was oppressive.

The men and women whose eager anxious faces looked down on the circular rows of senatorial chairs and desks were painfully conscious that they were witnessing the final scene of a great historical era.

What the future might hold God alone could know. Their fathers had dreamed a beautiful dream—"E Pluribus Unum"—one out of many. The union had yet to be realized as an historical fact. The discordant elements out of which our Constitution had been strangely wrought had fought their way at last into two irreconcilable hostile sections, the very structure of whose civilization rested on antagonistic conceptions of life and government.

The Northern Senators were in their seats with grave faces long before the last straggling Southerner picked his way into the Chamber bowing and smiling and apologizing to the ladies on whose richly embroidered dresses he must step or give up the journey.

For weeks the pretense of polite formalities between parties had been unconsciously dropped. Men no longer bowed and smirked and passed the time of day with shallow words.

With heads erect, they glanced at each other and passed on. And if they spoke, it was with taunt, insult and challenge.

Jennie\'s keen eyes rested on two vacant chairs on the floor of the Senate—every seat was crowded save these two.

She pressed Dick\'s arm.

"See—the vacant seats of South Carolina!"

"They\'re not vacant," the boy drawled.

"They are—look—"

"I see a white figure in each—"

"Nonsense!"

"We\'re going to have war, I tell you! Death sits in those chairs to-day, Jennie—"

"Sh—don\'t talk like that—"

The boy laughed.

"I\'m not afraid, you know—just a sort of second sight—maybe it means I\'ll be killed—"

South Carolina had felt no forebodings on the day her Convention had recalled those Senators. Kiett the eloquent leader of the Convention sprang to his feet, his face flaming with passion that was half delirium as he shouted:

"This day is the culmination of long years of bitterness, of suffering and of struggle. We are performing a great deed, which holds in its magic not only the stirring present, it embraces the ages yet to come. I am content with what has been done to-day. I shall be content with it to-morrow. We have lowered the body of the old union to its last resting place. We drop the flag over its grave."

When the vote was announced, without a single dissenting voice, the crowd rose to their feet with a shout of applause which shook the building to its foundations. It died away at last only to rise again with redoubled fury.

Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida had followed in rapid succession, Louisiana\'s Convention was to meet on the twenty-sixth, Texas on February first. On this the twenty-first day of January the Senators from Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had announced their farewell addresses to the Old union.

The girl\'s eyes swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief, bonnet or dress—every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had been imported direct from the fashion centers of Europe. Gowns of priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of Genoa, Venice and Brussels.

The South was rich.

And yet not one of her representatives held his office in Washington because of his money. Her ruling classes were without exception an aristocracy of brains—yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.

The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.

The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for discussion had passed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two vast sectional divisions on the issue.

Beyond the fierce and uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown into a consuming passion throughout the North and had resulted in the election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate—behind and underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental fact—the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and the fullness thereof were his.

And bigger than the fear of the confiscation of their property and the destruction of the Constitution their fathers had created loomed before the Southern mind the Specter of a new democracy at the touch of whose fetid breath the soul of culture and refinement they believed must die. In the vulgar ranks of this democracy must march sooner or later four million negroes but yesterday from the jungles of Africa.

This greater issue was felt but dimly by the leaders on either side but it was realized with sufficient clearness to make compromise impossible.

In vain did the aged and the feeble plead once more for compromise. Real men no longer wished it.

The day of reckoning had come. The seeds of this tragedy were planted in the foundation structure of the Republic.

The union of our fathers, for all the high sounding phrases of its Declaration of Independence was not a democracy. It was from the beginning an aristocratic republic founded squarely on African Slavery. And the degraded position assigned to the man who labored with his hands was recognized in our org............