Children of the Market Place

Dorothy and I lingered in Havana until we were sure that spring had come to Chicago. Then we took a boat to New Orleans; and once again I ascended the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence to Chicago by the Illinois River and the canal.

It was still cool in Chicago, the air fresh and vital. Great spaces of deep blue stood far back, cool and thrillingly serene; against these spaces the white clouds coming over from the far west and disappearing into havens over the lake and into Michigan. The lake was roaring to the stiff breezes of the blustering spring.

Chicago was a thrilling spectacle. The Illinois Central railroad was being built. The railroad mileage in the country had now risen to more than ten thousand miles. The short roads with steamboat connections were giving way to the trunk lines. Boston was now connected by rail with Montreal. There were nine hundred miles of railroad in Ohio; six hundred in Indiana; about four hundred in Illinois. The Michigan Central connected Chicago with Detroit. The Michigan Southern was opened, and the first train from the East had entered Chicago. A train had started west from St. Louis on the first five miles of the Pacific railroad. Telegraph lines stuck forth everywhere into the great spaces of the country, like the new shoots of a tree.

The breech-loading gun had been invented. The fire-alarm telegram system had come into use.

Thackeray had come over from England to smile upon us genially, to lecture at the rate "of a pound a minute," as he had expressed it. Young America was putting old America behind her.

Calhoun was gone. Clay, defeated in his life's ambition to be President, had crept to his grave. Webster was a dying man. The slavery question had vexed and shadowed his dying years. He had supported the Compromises of 1850 and had been bitterly denounced for it. Whittier had expunged his name from the list of the great and the good. He had wanted to be President too. Men like General Harrison had secured the prize over his head. He was reduced to the rejection of the proffered Vice Presidency. He had been Secretary of State under Harrison, Tyler, and Fillmore. He had supported the bank, the tariff, implied powers, and Hamiltonism. He had followed Clay's leadership. Still he had risen to great heights of oratory and legalistic reason. Carlyle had called him a logic machine in pants. His debate with Hayne, however, was to furnish the material for one of the greatest of state papers, to be written less than a decade from this day. From the hills of Massachusetts he failed to see the West. Young Douglas had fronted him and told him of the power of the new and growing country along the Mississippi River. Old America was passing. The West was asking for the highest recognition. Douglas was thirty-nine and seemed to be the man for President.

I did not pretend to be a politician, but only an observer and Douglas' friend. I read everything that was written about the questions of the day, the newspapers, the Congressional Record. It was clear to me that the Democrats had been split in 1848 by their attitude toward the Wilmot Proviso, which was intended to keep slavery from the Texan territory. Then came the Compromises under a Whig administration. The Compromises were hated by the South and cursed by the Abolitionists in the North. The Democrats were united by an acquiescence in the Compromises. And now the Whigs were divided because of them. They had played foxy in '48 by a no-platform. They were unable to have one, because they had no united voice. The Free Soil party had collapsed in Illinois. Altogether hopes ran high for the Democrats. But who should be the candidate?

Douglas! He seemed to me the ideal man, as Webster seemed the ideal man to admiring Whigs. But Douglas, like Webster, was doomed to fail, at least in this convention. The prize was captured by Franklin Pierce, whom no one knew, but it was not until the forty-ninth ballot. On the forty-eighth ballot Douglas had thirty-three votes to Pierce's fifty-five. Then there was a stampede to Pierce. The West had lost. Young America was put aside for a fair-sized man from New Hampshire.

The Whigs met the same month in Baltimore. Webster, soon to die, was again a candidate. The platform was made and submitted to him. He approved of it. It indorsed the Compromises. But again there was an old soldier in the field, in the person of General Scott. He had fought the British in 1812. He had made treaties with the Sauk, Fox, Winnebago, and Sioux tribes after the Black Hawk War. Yes, he had made a brilliant record in the Mexican War. In mental stature he was up to the knees of Webster, and no more. But Webster had no imaginative appeal. He could only pull twenty-nine votes on the first ballot, as against Scott's one hundred and thirty-one votes. Webster never had more than thirty-two votes. On the fifty-third ballot Scott was nominated. And in a few months Webster died, and left the tangles of statecraft to other hands.

Who was Franklin Pierce? Pretty soon Hawthorne, whose romances I had enjoyed so much, put forth a life of his long-time friend. "When a friend dear to him almost from boyhood days stands up before his country, misrepresented by indiscriminate abuse on the one hand, and by aimless praise on the other, it is quite proper that he should be sketched by one who has had opportunities of knowing him well and who is certainly inclined to tell the truth." These were Hawthorne's words. Pierce was a gentleman of truth and honor, devoted to his family and to his country, accomplished, of fine appearance, and always Democratic. But how could this man win against an old soldier? Webster and Douglas had lost the nomination, how could a gentleman win the election?

I returned to Chicago and to my business. But Douglas' term for Senator was about to expire, and he necessarily entered the campaign with vigor. He traveled from Virginia to Arkansas, from New York to Illinois and all over his own state. He mocked Scott's letter of acceptance, attributing its composition to Seward. His physical endurance seemed exhaustless. All the while he was living and confraternizing and drinking. Pierce was elected. Douglas won the legislature for another Senatorial term. In the midst of these excitements Mrs. Douglas died.

She had been to our house but recently. If I had prophesied between her and Dorothy I should have believed the end would come to Dorothy first. Dorothy was so frail, so incapable of effort. Already I was beginning to think of a milder climate for her for the winter.

Douglas now seemed to lose heart. His temper became bitter. His dress was slovenly, his manners familiar, his associations indifferent. He was drinking too much. In his public utterances he was more emphatic, more caustic of tongue. If the loss of the nomination had disappointed him, the death of Mrs. Douglas had overwhelmed him. He was not interested in his Illinois Central. He was doing nothing with his large tract of land three miles south of Madison Street. He was very well off. But he had no heart to enjoy his prosperity. He was doing nothing about founding his university. He was a giant sorely smitten, ready to rouse from irritability into fury against his enemies. He was in a poor way to master his own spirit and future.

I suggested to him a trip to Europe to forget his sorrows, to recuperate his spirits. He liked the idea. But first he had to return to the Senate. There he spoke of Cuba and its annexation, almost in the same words he had used when talking to me that midnight on the roof of the hotel in Havana. Bitterly he denounced the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Audaciously he excoriated England. Almost immediately he was off to visit England, but not to see Queen Victoria, although invited to her presence. He went to Russia, saw the Czar. He visited the Crimea and Syria. From New Orleans I followed his travels. I had taken Dorothy there to escape the Chicago winter.

New Orleans had grown to be a city of 170,000 people. Its commerce was enormous. It was the great entrepôt of the continent's sugar and cotton industries.

Day by day I stood on the wharves, watching the steamers unload and load, gazing over the busy mass of humanity back of which was labor, black and white, slave and free! The great Mississippi, broad and foul, waking from its sleep in the lowlands above, gathering speed here, feeling the call of the sea, begins to move with increased life. Across from the city are lowlands, sugar refineries, smoke stacks. The negroes call to each other, laugh with spontaneous, childlike humor. The wharf officers, the brokers, pass with intense faces. It is hot. Sweat drips from black faces and from white. Whips crack. Mules trot and stumble over the loose and resounding boards. Heavy wheels rumble. And the life of gambling, drinking, pleasure, crawls about the French quarter, along Canal Street, on Royal Street. The bell in the Cathedral rings. I catch the whiff of flowers. Gulls fly over the muddy water.

I think of Douglas far away in Russia, of all my life in its early days, now growing so misty. I am more than thirty-seven; and sometimes I feel weary. I grieve for Dorothy. She has wound herself with tenderness around my heart. But less and less can she share life with me.

I go to the Place d'Armes to see the equestrian statue of Jackson which has been erected here since my last visit. It is now called Jackson Square. The St. Louis Cathedral has been largely rebuilt. I wander through the Cabildo again, visit the old cemeteries, read the names of the dead. The scent of strange blossoms affects me poignantly. I stroll through the parks, and I visit the life in the French quarter.

Dorothy can drive with me at times, but not for long. Our boy distresses her; and a governess keeps him away much of the time. There are memories all about me. La Fayette has been here. He was in this very Cabildo. The old hero of New Orleans, who blessed Dorothy and me, walked these streets. Now he is long gone. Clay is gone, Webster, Calhoun. The country is at a pause. Hawthorne's friend is President. And Douglas is in St. Petersburg, riding a horse grotesquely, and bringing his western ways into the very presence of the Czar.

Sometimes I wonder if Zoe is not alive, if some kind of consummate trick was not played on me. Fortescue did not kill her. He did not seem to me like a man who would commit murder. Why would any one murder Zoe? Might she not have been sold for her loveliness to some man desiring a mistress? No! Zoe would write to me if she were living. Yet I went everywhere in New Orleans searching for Zoe.

Often I visited the St. Louis hotel, for there young quadroons and octoroons on sale, tastefully dressed, were inspected by men with all the critical and amorous interest with which a roué would look upon the object of his desire. Their eyes were gazed into, their hair stroked, their limbs caressed and outlined, their busts stared at and touched. Men went mad over these beauties.

A story went the rounds that a young man in Virginia fell in love with an octoroon slave while on a visit to a country house. The girl had gone to her mistress for protection, and received it, against the man's advances. But he had returned, saying that he could not live without the girl. The mistress had sold her to him for $1500. Did Zoe meet that fate, and not violence?

So I searched the cafes, the places of amusement, the bagnios for Zoe. And into every octoroon's face in which I saw a resemblance to Zoe I peered, hoping that it would be she. For with Dorothy so much ill, and with no one in the world of my own but Dorothy and our boy, I had hours of profound loneliness. In New Orleans this winter I was more lonely than I had ever been in my life. I no longer had to strive, I had money enough. And all the while my real estate investments in Chicago doubled and trebled while I traveled.

There were many French in New Orleans; there was reverence there and memory for Bonaparte. There was gladness and exultation now that Louis Napoleon had accomplished a coup d'état and established a throne upon the ruins of the republic. His soldiers were in the Crimea, fighting as desperately as if great wealth or fame could be won by their valor and death. But it was all for the glory of the French throne! A French monarchy again, after the struggles of Mirabeau, after the agony of Marat, and after the rise of republican principles which Douglas had hailed with delight! If these things could be done with honor and applause, did Douglas deserve the hostility which was rising up against him? Was America so immaculately free that Douglas' subordination of the negro to the welfare of the republic at large should be so severely dealt with?

On the bulletin boards in great headlines, the progress of the Crimean War was heralded. The French soldiers were winning imperishable glory. The Light Brigade had died for God and the glory of England in the charge at Balaklava. Cavour had sent the Sardinians to help France and England against the Russians; these were soon to fight for the liberty of Italy. Always liberty and God! Russia had gone to war against the Turks because of a quarrel between the Greek and Latin Christians at Jerusalem. Then the Czar demanded of the Turk the right of a protectorate over all Greek Christians in the Ottoman empire. It was refused. Hence war. And England and France and Cavour's Sardinians are fighting Russia. Perhaps the Latin church is the inspiring cause. Minds and noses concur, and the result is conscience.

America is in a distressed condition and growing worse. Politics raves. Malice, destroying forces are abroad. Always war with or without the sword. The Greek Christian must be protected; but the Turk must not be vanquished, his country taken by Russia. Louis Napoleon would win a little glory. England needs the Turk, because she lusts for Egypt and India. France wants Algeria and Morocco. In America the North wants power; the South wants power. Men are anxious for office. Labor has interests at stake; so has manufacturing. Farsighted money makers, imperialists, deploy these factions; parties are formed; the populace is fooled with war records and catch words. Men must be destroyed in order to achieve results—for God and liberty. Among others, Douglas must be destroyed!

He has risen from obscurity to be the first man in America in the realm of statecraft. He has been a cabinet maker, a lawyer, a legislator, a judge, a Senator, then a leader, now chairman of the committee on territories. He has perfected political efficiency, introduced the convention system, done for representative government what the reaper has done for the harvest field. He has done this all himself without wealth or family to boost him. He is charged with being clever and resourceful, but no one points to corruption in his life. Is there a statesman in Europe or one in America with a cleaner record? His whole energy has been devoted to the development of the country. He has worked for schools, for colleges, for canals, for railroads, for the quick dissemination of intelligence, for the rule of the people on every subject, including slavery, and for that rule in places of maturing sovereignty, like territories, and in places of complete sovereignty, like states. He is spiritually hard, hates the sap-head, the agitator, the simple-hearted moralist. He is indifferent to slavery, when it stands in the way of his republic building. He knows that slavery cannot thrive in the North. He knows that prairies of corn, hills of iron and coal, fields of wheat are as alien to slavery as the tropics are alien to polar bears and reindeer. He sees a God who works through climate; and he sees that the cotton calls for a certain kind of worker, and corn for another. He did not read and he did not know much of anything of the work of Marx and the Revolutionary Manifesto of 1848. He did not need to. He sensed the materialistic conception of history. He had no horror of slavery, knowing exactly what it was; on the other hand he was falsely accused of trying to plant it in the territories.

He was hunted and traduced! Moralists prattled of his lack of a moral nature; envy tracked him, shooting from ambush! He had become rich and famous. He was the first man in his party. He was young and full of power. He might be President. The sanctimonious quoted Scripture against him. "Where a man's treasure is, there will be his heart also," said an enemy in the Senate, referring to the fact that Douglas had married a woman who was a slave owner. Douglas had replied in these manly and tender words: "God forbid that I should be understood by any one as being willing to cast from me any responsibility that now does or has ever attached to any member of-my family. So long as life shall last and I shall cherish with religious veneration the memories and virtues of the sainted mother of my children—so long as my heart shall be filled with paternal solicitude for the happiness of those motherless infants, I implore my enemies who so ruthlessly invade the domestic sanctuary to do me the favor to believe that I have no wish, no aspiration to be considered purer or better than she, who was, or they who are slaveholders."

It was while I was in New Orleans that Douglas wrote me a letter regarding the Presidency. "I do not wish to occupy that position," he said. "I think that such a state of things will exist that I shall not desire the nomination. Yet I do not intend to do any act which will deprive me of the control of my own action. Our first duty is to the cause—the fate of individual politicians is of minor consequence. The party is in a distracted condition, and it requires all our wisdom, prudence, and energy to consolidate its power and perpetuate its principles."

It was this letter that stirred my reflections as I went about New Orleans reading of conditions in Europe and foolishly searching for Zoe. Moreover, I was beginning to be tired of everything in America, and particularly worn with New Orleans. I longed to be back in Chicago in the fresh air by the lake, away from the steam, the heat, the sensual atmosphere of this southern city. Yet Dorothy could not just now venture into the changeable climate of Lake Michigan. I was forced to stay on for her sake. I continued my wanderings and my thoughts about the city, guiding my business interests in Chicago by correspondence.

But at last we started.

I wanted to stop on the way to see Reverdy and Sarah. I had a call to the renewal of the old days, to an overlooking of the farm, the places I had first known in Illinois. But as Dorothy wished to be home, to settle into a regular life of comfort at once, I had to take her to Chicago and then return later to Jacksonville. Before leaving I had several conferences with Mr. Williams about our joint interests; and we talked of Douglas too.

Mr. Williams thought that Douglas was getting deeper and deeper into trouble. The Compromises of 1850 were only partially satisfactory. They had not appeased the Abolitionists. A new party was growing up around the discontent which those Compromises had created. Mr. Pierce's administration had met some disturbances, though it had sufficed in the main. He had gone into office with the support of many of the best men of the country, as, for example, Bryant, the poet, and of course Hawthorne, his boyhood friend. Since his election the Whig party had gone to pieces. There was no party but the Democratic party. Beside it nothing but factions and groups trying to find a way to unite. Chief of these was the Know-nothings who stood for what they called Americanism, and raised an opposition to Catholicism. Next were the Abolitionists. There were smaller bodies, all inharmonious. I felt that Douglas was destined to drive these lawless resolutes into defeat and become President. He was not in Chicago now; but I was soon to see him. In the meanwhile I thought I would go to see Reverdy and Sarah.

Reverdy was now in the middle fifties, and aging. Sarah looked thin and worn. She was really an old woman. Amos was a man. He had taken up with farming near Jacksonville. Jonas was nearing his twentieth year. The story was for the most part told for them all as one family.

Reverdy and I drove about the country; and it had changed so much. Boundaries had disappeared; forests had vanished. Familiar houses had given way to pretentious residences, many built in the southern style of Tennessee or Kentucky. Great barns dotted the landscape. Yet the pioneer was still here. My old fiddler in the woods had aged, but he was much himself. He played for us. And we went to the log hut, in which I had lived during my first winter on the farm. Here it was with its chimney of sticks, its single room of all uses, the very symbol of humble life, of solitariness in the woods. I had lived here when the country was wild, but Reverdy said that before my coming to Illinois it was wilder still and more lonely. "What do you think," said Reverdy, "of a man and a woman living here in the most primitive days; no church, no schools. No doctors to relieve suffering, or scarcely to attend a birth. No books, or but few. The long winters of snow; silence except when terrible storms broke over a roof like this. Imagine yourself born and reared in such a place; all the family sleeping in this one room in the bitter cold of winter. Sickness without medicine. Imagine Douglas living here. His early youth had its hardships; but after all he has had a comfortable life. He soon became prosperous. Now he is rich. What public man has become so rich? Yes, here is the American cotter's home; and so many boys have come out of a place like this and gone to the wars or into public life. It is America's symbol."

"You do not like Douglas, do you, Reverdy?" I asked, as we turned away. "Yes, I like him, I have always supported him—but somehow I feel that he is not good enough. I don't know what else to call it. You know, I don't like slavery; at the same time I don't know what to do with it. Sometimes I think Douglas' plan is all right, again I am not sure. All the time I feel that there is not enough sympathy in his nature for these poor negroes. I confess that at times I am for letting the territories manage it for themselves; and at other times I am for keeping it out of the territories by law. All the while I like Douglas' plan for the West. He has done wonderful work for the country. I wish I could make myself clearer, but I can't. I saw slavery in the South and know what it is. I am a good deal like Clay. He had slaves but disliked the institution. I have never had any slaves and I dislike it as much. Yet the question is what to do. If you keep it where it is you simply lay a siege about it. Great suffering will come in that way to the negroes of course. It is a kind of strangulation, selfish and small. On the other hand, if you give it breathing space what will become of the country? I know Douglas' argument that it cannot exist in the North. But suppose you have it all over the South, that's pretty big. Besides, what's to hinder new work being found for the slaves? Why can't they dig coal and gold like peons? Why can't they farm? Perhaps not; and yet I am not so sure of Douglas on that. He is the most convincing man in the world when you are with him. But when he goes away from you his spell slips off and you see the holes in his argument."

"You have been reading and thinking, haven't you, Reverdy?"

"Oh, yes, all the time. What I am afraid of is a war. I had a little dab of it in the Black Hawk trouble. But a war between these states would shake the earth. I have two boys, you know. Sarah worries about it. Everybody's beginning to live in a kind of terror."

"I have read about it too, ever since I have been in America. I have applied my philosophically exercised faculties to it. I have talked with Mr. Williams about it many times and with Douglas. I have had dozens of conversations on all these things. It seems to me that I could advance some new arguments myself."

"What new arguments could you advance?" asked Reverdy.

"Well," I said, "suppose I wanted to take a definite stand that slavery is wrong, which these Whigs won't. They only play with the question. They want to limit it perhaps. But why? Is it wrong? Or is it against northern interests? What? But suppose I took such a stand and needed a legal foundation. Couldn't I say that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories under the power it has to regulate commerce between them? I put this question to Mr. Williams and he hadn't thought of it; but he told me that Judge Marshall held that commerce was traffic. Very well? Isn't slavery traffic? It's buying and selling. It impresses things that are bought and sold—cotton. And slaves are the subject of traffic. Therefore to regulate it—keep the slaves out of the territories where they might be bought and sold after getting into the territories, as well as where they might be sold into the territories—is the regulation of commerce, isn't it? Well now, isn't that better than calling the territories property and subject to the arbitrary rule of Congress as merely inert matter? If you can rule the territories arbitrarily as to slavery, why not as to anything else? Suppose we annex Cuba; under this doctrine we could rule Cuba arbitrarily, just as England ruled the Colonies here arbitrarily. Then take the assumption that Congress has the power to keep slavery out of the territories; just the power, not the express duty; well, it follows that Congress has the power to let it in the territories. If it can put it in or out of the territories it can leave the territories to put it in or out. And why isn't that best? Right here is the point of my adherence to Douglas. For I see a growing central power in this country not acting on its lawful authority, but upon its own will, dictated by theories of morality or trade or monopoly. If this matter is left to the territories it is left to the source of sovereign power and to local interests; if it is controlled by Congress it means an increasing centralization. What I really mean is that this mere assumption that Congress can deal with the matter in virtue of some vague sovereignty, without pointing out some express power in Congress to do so, leads straight to imperialism. And thus on the whole, having a regard for the future of America and its liberty, I stand with Douglas. I have read Webster in his theories that the territories are property, and can therefore be dealt with under the clause which empowers Congress to make all needful laws and regulations for the territory and other property of the United States. Well, why doesn't he go farther and let Congress at one stroke emancipate the slaves? For a slave is certainly property, and if needful rules and regulations as to the negro require his emancipation, why can't he be emancipated under this clause? But if territory is property, so is a slave. And if territory is property, who owns the property? Why, all the states of course. And if they own the land and own the slaves too, why can't they take into their own land, unless they are forbidden to do so by a majority of the states, representatives legislating under some clause of the Constitution which gives them the right to do so?"

"Oh, yes," said Reverdy, "I have heard most of this before. But I'll tell you: the first man of account who rises up to say that slavery is wrong will be remembered, even if he is not honored. I am not talking about all these agitators and fellows; nor even of Seward or of Hale—they're too sharp and smart. I mean some man who puts the right feeling into the thing like Mrs. Stowe did in her book. You see, I was raised in Tennessee, and I don't care how you apologize for it, or make it look like labor of other kinds, or prove that all labor is slavery, just the same this negro slavery is vile. You can find good reasons for anything you want to do. I don't know where we get our right and wrong—it comes up from something deep in us. But when we get it, all this argument that Douglas is so skillful in simply melts away. I really wonder that so many women in the South favor slavery and that my mother was so wedded to it, and Dorothy now."

We were passing now the house I had built. "Who lives there now?" I asked. Reverdy gave me the name. It was not the man to whom I had sold the farm. I thought of Fortescue. "Where is Fortescue?" "Oh, he lit out from here," said Reverdy. "Do you know," I said, "I have thought it possible that Zoe might not be dead." "How could that be?" "I don't know. I feel that I went through that transaction dazed and without verifying things, as I should have done." "Oh, no, if Zoe were living you would know of it long before now."

After our drive we came back to Sarah and the meal that she had prepared for us. Women reflect the politics of the hour in nerves and anxiety, in anticipated sorrows. Sarah wished all agitations to stop. She longed for peace. She was in dread of war. Perhaps Dorothy's health had been affected by the growing turbulence of the country.

Young Amos and Jonas came in and ate with us. We turned to the talk of railroads and the growth of Chicago. Sarah took a hand now and said: "These things are all right. You won't get any war out of railroads and telegraphs. You men can reason and argue as much as you please about this slavery matter; but I have two sons, and I didn't bring them into the world to be killed in a war; and I won't have it if I can help it—not for all the niggers in the world."

If I were recording the life of an artist I should be dealing with different causes acting upon his development, or with different effects produced by the same times in which Douglas lived. Instead I am trying to set forth the soul of a great man who extracted from his environment other things than beauty; or rather the beauty of national progress. The question was, after all, whether Douglas was helping to give America a soul. What was he accomplishing for the real greatness of his country by giving it territory and railroads? What kind of a soul was he giving it? Who in this time was giving America a soul? Abigail had often hinted at these questions. And I had to confess that they occupied my thoughts.

I run over now with as much brevity as possible the events which led to the crisis of Douglas' life. With the Compromises of 1850 the Whig party began its rapid decline. The South did not like the Whig tariff. The Whig attitude on the slavery question was too ambiguous to appeal to the North. With its dissolution other organizations began to feed on its remains. The Know-nothings arose and disappeared, without accomplishing anything. Greeley said of them that they were "as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-cholera or anti-potatobug party would be."

In early 1854 the Whigs, Free Soilers and Anti-Slavery Democrats met at Ripon, Wisconsin, and proposed to form a new party, to be called the Republican party. They took part of the name which Jefferson had coined, dropping the word "national" out. Douglas, enraged by this blasphemy against Jefferson, suggested that the word "black" be put in where "national" had been left out, making the name Black Republican party.

A year later Douglas put through his bill for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska, which provided that they could come into the Union with or without slavery as they chose. He had long before voted against slavery prohibition in Texas; for the extension of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific; for the Compromises of 1850, which made California free and left Utah and New Mexico to come in free or slave, according to their own wish. I had to confess that he had no clear constitutional theory himself. He was only growing more emphatic in favor of popular sovereignty as a name for territorial independence on the subject. He compared this popular sovereignty to the rights which the Colonies asserted against England to manage their own affairs, and for the violation of which the Revolution ensued. The principle had appeared in most of the bills that he had sponsored or supported. Now it was the real doctrine. He was like an inventor who, after making many experiments, hits upon a working device. He was like a philosopher, who conceives the theory, then clears it, shears away its accidents or even abandons it. He had long been distrusted in the South. The Kansas-Nebraska bill still further alienated the South. The South wanted slavery carried into the territories by the Constitution, even against the will of the people of the territories. What had Douglas to gain with popular sovereignty? He really overestimated its appeal. He knew that the South did not like it, but he believed that it was sound, and that it would win the majority of the people. He advanced it not only as a solution of a vexed condition, but in the name of Liberty.

He misconceived the case, and here his tragedy began to flourish. I was sorry to witness his discomfiture and his first forensic defeat. Clergymen denounced him; and thinking no doubt that they were the spokesmen of the back-hall radicalism and ignorant morality which he despised, he fought them back bitterly: "You who desecrate the pulpit to the miserable influence of party politics! Is slavery the only wrong in the country? If so, why not recognize the great principles of self-government and state equality as curatives?"

He was burned in effigy and branded a traitor, a Judas, a Benedict Arnold. The whole mob power was used against him. But he was Hercules furious. He was against the wall, but unrepentant. He came to Chicago and announced that he would speak in front of the North Market Hall. It was September, and still lovely summer weather. I could not induce Dorothy to go, so Mr. Williams, Abigail, Aldington, and I went to hear Douglas defend himself. All the afternoon before this evening bells were tolled, flags were hung at half-mast. I got to Douglas, telling him that I feared violence to his person. He waved me off. His brow was heavy with scowls, his eyes deep with emotion. He was like a man ready to fight and die. Finally the hour arrived, and he mounted the platform intrepidly, amid hisses and howls. He paused to let the tumult die. He began again. He was hooted. He stepped forward undaunted, and let forth the full power of his voice:

"I come to tell you that an alliance has been made of abolitionism, Maine liquor-lawism, and what there was left of northern Whiggism, and then the Protestant feeling against the Catholic, and the native feeling against the foreigner. All these elements were melted down in one crucible, and the result is Black Republicanism."

A voice called out: "You're drunk!" Bedlam broke loose. In a silence Douglas retorted: "Let a sober man say that." There were cheers. He went on:

"How do you dare to yell for negro freedom and then deny me the freedom of speech? I claim to be a man of practical judgment. I do not seek the unattainable. I am not for Utopias."

"Topers!" said a voice, and there were yells.

"Nor for topers," resumed Douglas.

"I want results. What have you done with prohibition of slavery in the North by Federal law? You who want negro equality, why don't you repeal the laws of Illinois that forbid the intermarriage of white and blacks, that forbid a negro from testifying against a white man, that allow indentures of apprenticeship, and that require registration of negroes brought into the state, the same as you license a dog? The Federal government does not prevent you. The Ordinance of 1787 gave you the start that you want for Kansas and Nebraska. Yet you have these things; and you don't have slavery. Why? Not because the Federal government says you can't have it, but because you yourself do not want it. I say that this northern country is dedicated by God to freedom, law or no law; if it hadn't been, General Harrison, who introduced slavery into Indiana against the Ordinance of 1787 would have introduced something that would be there now. So much for you Whigs who voted for Harrison in 1840."

A voice:

"How about Kansas and Nebraska?" There were more yells. "I am telling you, if you will hear me. You old Whigs who followed Henry Clay to the end, why do you denounce me when the Kansas-Nebraska bill is the same in principle as Clay's Compromises of 1850 ..."

"How about California?"

"It was a compromise. And as I have said before if the people of California had wanted a slave state they would have had it, any law to the ..."

Voices crying: "Benedict Arnold! Judas!" Douglas' voice rose to its fullest power. He was fulminating Black Republicans, Know-nothings, Anti-Catholics, humbug Whigs. I felt sure that he would be attacked. For two hours he fought with this wild and wicked audience. He appealed to their sense of fairness. If he was wrong, what harm to hear him through, the better to see the wrong? If he was right, why condemn him unheard? I could only make out a few sentences from time to time. He grew weary at last. He drew out his watch. The audience quieted to hear what he would say. "It is now Sunday morning. I will go to church and you may go to hell."

He stepped from the platform, walked boldly through the angry mob, ready to assault him. Without a tremor, fearlessly he edged his way along to his carriage, got into it, and was driven away, the mob hooting, bolder rowdies running after him, and covering him with vile epithets.

We walked away slowly without speaking to each other. We were too shamed, too sympathetic with Douglas to tolerate this exhibition of lawlessness. We were disgraced by an American audience which had tried to disgrace an American Senator, who asked for nothing except for the privilege of being heard.

When we arrived at Clark and Randolph streets Aldington and Abigail paused for a moment before turning in a direction different from mine. They said good night and went on. I walked with Mr. Williams until I arrived at my house. Then I went in, to lie awake and to think of the spectacle of the evening.

The next day I went out to look at the ten acres which Douglas had given for the founding of the University of Chicago. I walked over the ground, came to the lake. I was thinking that if Douglas' life were ending in failure how futile was my own life! I was rich to be sure, but what had I done? I had inherited money. Douglas had started in poverty and accumulated a fortune. I had done nothing but increase my wealth. Douglas' activities had covered many fields, and now if he was to fall! What was American liberty? How could their devotion to a liberty, bring liberty to him? Douglas' wife was dead; Dorothy was an invalid.

In a few days I went around to see Abigail. That terrible evening remained a subject that must sometime be discussed between us.

Abigail was never more gracious than on this occasion, and seemed to understand that I needed to be lifted out of my reflections. She knew what Dorothy's invalidism meant to me, and she was sympathetic with my devotion to Douglas, in so far as it was an expression of human friendship. She had a point of view about everything, which had been developed and clarified by reading and travel. It came over me that I had been nowhere in Europe, that I had been wandering up and down America. My life in England was by now almost obliterated from my consciousness. We were not long in the talk before she said that a man should have more than one interest, that music or some form of art, or a hobby in literature should be taken up as a relaxation from business. What were politics but the interpretation of business? She showed me some pictures she had been painting. A teacher had opened a studio in Lake Street. Why did I not try my hand? I would find it a diversion from other things. I had always loved etchings. I wished I could do that. Well, this artist taught etching too. She inspired me at once to see him. His name was Stoddard, and she gave me the number. I conceived an enthusiasm for this new activity, thinking that it would take me out of myself and away from the America that was closing around me with such depressing effect.

Then Abigail and Aldington in supplement of each other began to recall the names of men then living whom they characterized as light-bearers. "Really," said Abigail, "there are only a few men of real importance in America to-day. These politicians and orators—Seward, Sumner, even the late Webster—amount to very little after all. They are even less than Lowell, whom Margaret Fuller recently characterized as shallow and doomed to oblivion. Longfellow is an adapter, a translator, a simple-hearted man. Whittier—well, all of them have fallen more or less under the moralistic influence of the country."

"That is what I like about Douglas," I said. "He is not a humbug. I like his ironical voice against all these silly movements, like liquor laws; these ideas like God in the little affairs of men; all this barbarism which breaks into religious manias; all these half-baked reformations. They carry me with him into an opposition to negro equality—all this stuff of Horace Greeley, Emerson, and in which men like Seward and Sumner, and American writers and poets, big and little, share."

"Oh, yes," said Abigail, "but after all you can say Douglas is just a politician. You do not need to grieve about him. He is tough enough to stand anything. He was put down by that mob. But I dare say he was not as much disturbed about it as you were. If he should die to-day what would the world lose? He has no great unfinished books, no half-painted pictures, no musical scores without the final touches. Look over the world, my friend. Do you realize who is living in it to-day? In Russia, Tolstoi and Turgenieff; in Germany, Schopenhauer, Freytag, Liszt, Wagner—Wagner is just Douglas' age too. In France, Hugo, George Sand, Renan, Berlioz, Bizet. In England, Tennyson, Macaulay. These are only a few. What has Douglas written or said that will live? What has he done that will carry an influence to a future day? I want to see you lift yourself out of this. Frankly, you seem to me like a man who has never come to himself. You have lived here in Illinois since you were a boy. You found work to do, and you did it. You wanted to be rich, you have had your wish. But the material you have handled has become you. It has entered the pores of your being, and become assimilated with its flesh. You have gone on oblivious of this greater world. There is another thing, and I have never known this to fail: you were a soldier in the Mexican War, and the causes for which it was fought have burned themselves into your nature. You are like a piece of clay molded and lettered and shoved into the hot oven of war. You came forth with Young America, Expansion burned into you. Douglas, being your close friend, and being for these things, gave interpretations to these words. Your glaze took the reflection of his face; and these words became other words of like import, or imaginatively enlarged by the lights which his winning art cast upon them. Give Douglas wit, humor, and he would carry the whole country. For it runs after greatness of territory, railroads, the equality of man, the superiority of the white race. As dull as the mob is it knows that Douglas does not stand for its morality and its God. If he had wit he could make them laugh and forget the distance that divides him from them. We all understand why he has enemies; why the revolutionaries from Germany, Hungary, Austria, divide in doubt over him. But what has he to carry against them that will be a loss to the world, if he fails?" I felt a little apologetic for my devotion to Douglas as Abigail talked. Had I made a god of a poor piece of clay? No, it was not true. I knew him, I believed in him. He was the clearest voice in all this rising absurdity of American life. But Abigail had given me one idea that I wished to act upon.

I went the next day to see Stoddard and started to learn etching. If I could only transfer to the copper plate what I had seen of sand hills, pines, pools of water, the gulls over the lake, the picturesque shacks of early Chicago of 1833 and 1840; the old wooden drawbridge, which was over the river in 1834, with the ships beyond it toward the lake and the lighthouse, and in the forefront canoes on the shore, covered with rushes and sand grass. After a few days I saw Douglas. He came on an evening when I was just about to go to him. I had been thinking of him day by day, but waiting for the effect of his rough experience in front of the North Market to wear away from his thoughts and mine. He was now himself again, his eye keen, his voice melodious, his figure pervaded by animation. I noticed perhaps for the first time how small and graceful were his hands. The greatness and shapeliness of his head could not be overlooked. From beneath shaggy and questioning brows his penetrating eyes looked straight through me. Had his pride been wounded, his spirits dampened? Not at all. He was willing to face any audience anywhere. He had told the South unpleasant truths. He had satirized the groups that went to the making of the Republican party. "I have a creed," he said, "as broad as the continent. I can preach it boldly, and without apology North or South, East or West. I can face Toombs or Davis, if they preach sectional strife, or advocate disunion. I can continue to point out the narrow faith of Sumner and Seward. I shall not abate my contempt for the ragged insurrectionists who are going about the country for lack of better business, scattering dissension. Am I to be President? There is trouble now in Kansas and Nebraska. Can I help that? I have stood for the right of the people there to have slavery or not as they chose. But if any trick is played on either of them, whether in favor of slavery or against it, they will find me on the spot ready to fight for an honest deal."

Seeing Douglas in all his strength and self-confidence again I was happy. We talked of the old days and drank from the old bottle. I took him to the door, followed his retreating figure down the street, so short but so massive. Then I went to Dorothy, to find her sleepless and unhappy.

No way to mark time quicker than by Presidentials. Four years pass in the space of two or less; for no sooner is a President installed than committees meet for reformations and plans. Six months between the election and the installation of a President! When he has served a year the election is nearly two years passed. Thus, as it seemed, the election of 1856 was upon the country before we had time to appreciate what Mr. Pierce had done. Had he had a fair chance in such a brief period to do anything? I was at work attending to my business, trying to etch too, but I could not keep my mind off the game of politics. Among the tens of thousands of men in Illinois who were devoted to Douglas no one was more loyal to his ambition than I, and perhaps no one was less conspicuous. I followed the New York Tribune, the Springfield Republican, the North American Review, the Independent, Harper's Weekly, and the southern press, as well as the papers of Illinois. I had made a large book of clippings, which expressed the journalistic thought of the country. All these things put together kept me fully occupied. Our son Reverdy was coming to an age when his schooling would need attention. I wished to send him to England. But that was difficult to do, because, while Dorothy was urging a trip abroad she wished to go to Italy, on account of the climate.

In truth Dorothy was growing more distressed every day over American affairs. She found harshness in Chicago. She did not find sympathy with the ideas with which she had grown up. Her failure to make close friends interfered with her social delights. Mrs. Douglas had perhaps been her greatest intimate. With her death she had seemed to lose interest in other cordial associations. Her nervous organization was badly devitalized. I, too, hoped to see the continent, and particularly Italy. But I did not wish to leave until the campaign was over, owing to my interest in Douglas. I wanted to watch affairs now, but also I wished to help Douglas, if I could.

For the first time the Republicans entered the field. They adopted a platform which incorporated the Declaration of Independence. It was against popular sovereignty, lest the people vote in slavery, or be tricked into doing so. It stood for Congressional control of slavery extension, and implicit in this was the constitutional power of Congress to do so. It had, with the Declaration of Independence, with the invocation of God, and appeals to the Bible, gathered a working force in the country. The press, the platform, had been busy to this end. Seward with his higher law was a contributor. Chase, who was termed by Douglas a debater, where Seward and Sumner were only essayists, was one of the big figures in the new movement. Beecher and Greeley were spokesmen of the new organization. The convention nominated Fremont who had explored Oregon in 1842.

He was of the spirit of Douglas. He was an expansionist. He had gone into California in 1845, and raised the American flag on a mountain overlooking Monterey. He had helped later to conquer California. He had for various audacious and disobedient acts been tried and court-martialed, and dismissed from military service. President Polk had approved the verdict, but remitted the penalty. Then he had resigned. Now he was the object of the highest honor of an American convention. He was made the spokesman for a platform which denounced the invasion of Kansas by an armed force in the interests of slavery. He had gone into California for the slavocracy which engineered the Mexican War, as New England contended. Now he was at the head of the party waging war upon that slavocracy. A strange people, these Americans!

Douglas had said that he did not want the office of President. Perhaps that was an exhibition of political coyness, for he was in the lists just the same! He had 33 votes on the first ballot, of which only 14 came from the South. President Pierce, who was running again, met a wavering fortune. On the sixteenth ballot he had not a vote. Douglas had 121 votes; a certain Mr. Buchanan had 168. On the seventeenth ballot this Mr. Buchanan was nominated. Who was this Mr. Buchanan?

He had been Secretary of State under Polk, had helped to secure the Texan territory. So much for the appeal to Young America. He had been minister to Great Britain. Therefore he was abroad when Douglas was gummed with the poisonous sweet of Kansas and Nebraska. He thought slavery was wrong; therefore, you Abolitionists, here's the man for you. He held that territorial extension of slavery need not be feared; let the people rule. As a Congressman he had voted to exclude abolition literature from the mails; come forward Calhoun-ites and vote for Buchanan. They did. Fremont did not get a vote in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee; and only 281 in Maryland, 291 in Virginia, and 364 in Kentucky. But Millard Fillmore, running on a platform of America for Americans, almost divided the vote with Buchanan in those states. He carried Maryland against Buchanan; but of the whole popular vote he was nearly a million behind Buchanan. Fremont had 1,341,264 votes and Buchanan had 1,838,169 votes. The electoral college gave Buchanan 174 votes, Fremont 114, and Fillmore 8. Why could Douglas not have been nominated?

We got the news by telegraph in Chicago. As I studied the bulletins, I was wondering whether the result was symptomatic of transient causes or whether it betokened great changes. Had the Declaration of Independence been approved at the polls? How was Douglas taking it? I did not see him. I wrote to him, but he did not reply. Did he get my letter, or was he consoling himself in convivial ways?

I now prepared to go abroad. I was leaving a country that had changed in almost every way since I had come to it. I was leaving a city that was nothing but a hamlet when I first saw it. I had seen New Orleans and Chicago connected by rail, and the state grow from a few hundred thousand to a million population. I had seen Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, California, added to the Union. Coal and iron had become barons and were doing the bidding of steam, which was king. The oil that had floated on the surface of the salt wells of Kentucky was soon to be more powerful than cotton. Everything had changed—but man. Was he rising to a purer height, had a glory begun to dawn on America? Should slavery, polygamy, rum, be driven from the land? Then should we be free and happy, and just and noble? France had got schools and the ballot by the Revolution, but now she had a throne again. We had the ballot but did we have freedom? No law could have made a mob hiss Douglas at the North Market. Freedom in their hearts would have given him an audience.

Was I free? Was I happy? I was not free. I was not happy. My life seemed cribbed. Dorothy was an invalid. I went to her from watching the election bulletins. I sat on the side of the bed, took her in my arms. "Let us go to Italy," she said. "I am dying here." She pressed her frail hands around my neck. "Oh let us go—let us go."

We sailed on the Persia, 376 feet long, 45 feet of beam, gross tonnage 3300, horsepower 4000, speed 14 knots an hour. As Dorothy knew nothing of ocean sailing craft she was unable to share in my wonder at all the splendor and comfort of this wonderful steamer.

From the first Dorothy was ill. Our boy Reverdy too became seasick. As I was not affected in the least I had the care of both of them. A part of the time the sea was very rough.

One night when we had been on the water three days Dorothy called to me. She had been greatly nauseated during the afternoon. A sudden return of the discomfort had seized her. I arose quickly and made a light. The boat was rocking. A stiff breeze was blowing. We were headed through a great darkness. Dorothy was deathly pale. She was unable to bring up anything more and was convulsed with retching and coughing.

She grew suddenly quiet, her eyes closing, her lips parting. "Dear," she murmured. I waited for what she would say. She had become at once limp in my arms. I shook her gently, pressed my ear to her breast. I could hear no heart beat. I called her, laid her down, wetted a towel, and applied it to her head. She did not rouse. I went from the stateroom to find the physician. He came hurriedly. But Dorothy was dead. That word of endearment was her last.

Without, the sea and the sky were as black as a sunless cave. The water rolled around us, pitching the boat forward and sideways. The timbers creaked, lamps jiggled, the hallways seemed to undulate like snakes. But the heart of the Persia pumped with rhythmic regularity. The passengers were asleep, or in various festivities, in cabins or in the dining room. Nothing was stayed for this tragedy which had come to me. On we went through the darkness! Dorothy was lying where I had placed her, her head turned to one side, her face pale in the last sleep. I aroused little Reverdy. He looked at his mother, kneeled by the berth, and sobbed. The physician took us out of the cabin, locked the door, and put us in another. I tucked little Reverdy in bed again; then I went out to look, at the storm, the dark water, the impenetrable sky.

Back of me was America, flattened out like a map in my imagination, lost and sunk like old Atlantis. I sent my mind across it from New York to Chicago, from Chicago to California. What was it? Earth, a continent containing an embattled and disappointed Douglas, millions of struggling people. Ahead of me, over thousands of miles of water, an unknown Italy. I lived over all my life, but mostly now all my life with Dorothy, from those first days in Jacksonville when I was under a cloud because of Zoe and the killing of Lamborn, to our days in Nashville; the ecstasy of first love, our walks and restings among the Cumberland hills, the kindness of Mother Clayton, her joy when she learned that Dorothy had consented to become my wife. I saw again the face of Jackson, his eyes, his reverence when he kissed the brow of Dorothy; his tears and his feeble step when he walked away from us. And I lived over early Chicago, all my days with Douglas. Where was he now on that flattened, negligible map called America? In what soil had Zoe moldered into the earth? What had become of Fortescue? Where were Abigail and Aldington, Reverdy, Sarah, this night? How could the millions storming over slavery and war, territories, sugar and cotton and iron, gold and railways think of these things if they were face to face with a reality as stark as I was, in a boat rolled by dark water, tossing forward toward Europe and with a burden like the dead body of Dorothy? All this night I walked the deck. I saw the dawn come up, ragged and blue, patched with dark clouds, which the wind drove close to the mounting waves.

The captain ordered an autopsy. Dorothy had died of heart failure. Then there was to be a burial at sea. In the afternoon the clouds lifted from the sky. Toward the west the sun burned over the water, making a wake of fire from the boat to the utmost horizon. I took a last look at Dorothy, kissed her cold brow. Then she was wrapped with sheets on a plank weighted with iron, and taken to the stern of the boat. I stood near to see it all, with little Reverdy weeping as if his heart would break.

The body is cast into the water, and in the very golden wake of the sun. I cannot hear the splash; I only see a slight flap of the sheet. The water closes over instantly. A gull frightened into a slight veering off turns to the spot where Dorothy has disappeared. No ripples to mark the place where she has been received by the sea! The boat has gone on without staying. I keep my eyes fixed on the place. Waves cross and recross over it. The sunlight shifts. Tears and the sun blind my eyes. I rest them a moment and then look again. Where was it that Dorothy sank? What great fish started at the splash, the white apparition; and then returned to nibble? To what depths has Dorothy sunk? To what darker waters has she been towed by some creature of prey? The sailors have gone to their other duties. Little Reverdy is by my side, weeping softly. I must write to the older Reverdy back in Jacksonville. He is her only relation in the world. To-night I must sleep, if I can.

But I do not sleep. I wonder if I have been a good husband to Dorothy. What was she doing, how living, in the years past, when I was absorbed in business, following the fortunes of Douglas, studying the books that had no bearing upon her happiness nor, alas, upon mine? I saw her now as patient, sometimes alone, perhaps always waiting for me, but never complaining. How many happy hours had I sacrificed to other things when I might have been with her! Was Dorothy happy? Did she love me? I began to think over the occasions of her demonstrations of affection—after all how few they were! Always tender toward me, but how infrequently were there moments of passion, of ecstasy. Had I awakened all of her nature? Had I been living a neutral life all these years? Was I in some sort a negligible character, without magnetism, of unfulfilled passion? A slumbering nature?

But where now was Dorothy's body? We were fifty miles, seventy-five miles, a hundred miles from the unmarked spot of burial. She had sunk fathoms into the abyss. The bell on the boat had rung the midnight, then one o'clock. I heard it toll for two—then I slept. I awoke hearing little Reverdy sobbing. I stood out of the berth and tried to comfort him. Then we dressed and went to breakfast. Whatever happens there must be coffee and toast. Then I walked the deck and longed for land.

We changed boats at Cherbourg. Then a dreary voyage to Naples. We hurried through the noise and colorful disorder of Naples and drove by carriage to Rome. We entered the same gate through which Milton and Goethe had passed, into the Piazza di Spagna. At the foot of the steps leading to Trinita di Monti—here where the foreigners stayed, the English quarter. I found accommodations in a pension. First there was the unpacking, and little Reverdy had to be kept comforted, if possible; I must start him in school too. Life must always go on. I became sensible of many bells. The strange noises of a civilization wholly unknown to me came up through my window. I looked out upon the Piazza di Spagna, knowing nothing of its history. Who would be my friends here? Back of me was nearly a quarter of a century in America and before me what?

Our pension was all that could be desired. Mr. and Mrs. Winchell were here from America, from Connecticut. She was about twenty-seven; he was nearly sixty. They were on their way around the world, stopping in Rome for some months. She was studying painting under an artist who also taught etching. In this way I came under the instruction of Luca, who had a studio not far from the Piazza di Spagna, and also into daily association with Mrs. Winchell.

First little Reverdy had to be placed in school and given a tutor. Before doing this I took him around the city, and we saw together some of the churches: S. Maria del Popolo, S. Giovanna dei Laterano, S. Angelo, S. Paolo. I took him to the Pantheon, the Coliseum, to St. Peter's, into the Vatican. Thus I gained my first impressions; and on these rounds I found the courier Serafino Maletesta, who became a source of so much interest and delight to me.

My mornings were spent in Luca's studio; my afternoons in sightseeing with Serafino, in which Mr. and Mrs. Winchell joined, though infrequently by him. He was ageing and not well. And often from the beginning Mrs. Winchell and I set off together with Serafino to explore museums, visit the Palatine, drive to the edge of the city where the Alban hills were plainer across the Campagna, as level as a prairie around Jacksonville.

I was struggling with Italian, carrying on such conversation as I could with Serafino, and with Mrs. Winchell, who was growing proficient in the language.

Serafino was something past sixty. He had been with the Carbonari of 1820, and in the Italian revolution of 1830-31. He saw this suppressed. Then when the republican movements of 1848 shook Europe, he had participated in the third Italian revolution of that year; and again he had seen Italy put down, this time by the intervention of the French, whose Louis Napoleon sought by this action to win the friendship of the Catholic clergy in France. The hated Austrians now ruled Lombardy and Venice. In Rome, now that the Pope again had temporal, power, the political affairs of the city were in the hands of Cardinal Antonelli, who suppressed political agitation with great severity. It was not only an American audience before North Market Hall in Clark Street, Chicago, that denied the freedom of speech. Cardinals were up to the same thing, as well as mobs.

Serafino told me calmly, with occasional profanity, of the arrest of large numbers of Italians who belonged to the Unita Italiana at Naples, whose condemnation was speedily followed by hideous dungeons and atrocious cruelties. There was slavery in Italy too!

Italy was under the heel of Austria. Religious bigotry, more subtle and more powerful than the slavocracy of America, was crushing hope from the lives of the Italians, while Mazzini and Cavour battled like Titans against the powerful hierarchy of monarchy and Catholicism. There was little of the history of Italy, of ancient Rome, that was seemingly unknown to Serafino. He had read all his life; and he had been in the actual conflicts of awakening Italy. Now his head shook a little when his face reddened from suppressed wrath. He cursed quietly, but with a terrible energy. He was poor; but there was a refinement in his personal appearance. His worn shoes were always polished, his coat and trousers of many years service were always brushed. He would appear at the appointed hour, bright of eye, cleanly shaven, and always with wonderful suggestions for sightseeing for the afternoon. He lived somewhere near the Forum. Having never married he was continuing a friendship formed long ago with a woman who kept house for him and lived with him. As he was no longer fitted for a battle or strife he was now an adviser to younger men. He was no doubt suspected but he seemed to have no fear. As we went about among priests and soldiers he smiled and spoke to them.

He knew them of old and a certain security seemed to be his. His two interests were politics and art, but art had won him almost completely. What he knew of history and of art, his life-long residence in Rome made him the most interesting of couriers.

Our conversations widened and deepened day by day. Had he heard of Douglas? No. He had read Uncle Tom's Cabin. What did I know of Mrs. Stowe? I ran over the list of our notables. They meant nothing to him. State sovereignty, popular sovereignty, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromises of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska act were words without significance. But there was negro slavery. "How can that be in your country?" he asked, and laughed ironically. "If all men are created free and equal how about the negro?" he asked.

I went on to tell Serafino, that Thomas Jefferson, when drafting the Declaration of Independence, had condemned George III who had forbidden the American Colonies "to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce"; but that the clause was stricken out by South Carolina and Georgia. Therefore that the Declaration did not mean negroes when it said "all men." Serafino looked at me with quiet, comprehending eyes which said: "It's the same struggle of money and power everywhere." He added aloud: "Italy will never eat free bread and have enough of it until the Austrian is driven off our back. They make us work and take away our labor in taxes. We are negroes too."

He wanted to know something of Garrison, of whom he had heard. What was thought of Washington in America? But in the midst of these subjects he would stop to point to a broken column, a ruined temple; or he would turn suddenly into an old church to show me some beloved picture. After all, the old life of street brawls, debates, and dungeons had faded out of him with the dying of the rebellious fires of youth. There were only echoes of these thunderous events in his soul. His eye only brightened fully before a picture or a statue. His reverence arose only to some perfection of color or of form.

Once he took me by a quick turn, as if by impulse, into an old church. "There is a lovely Madonna here," he said. "Who painted it?" "Some pupil of Raphael's perhaps." Serafino removed his hat and stood reverently before this beautiful face, so human, so tender. "I have heard you say so much against the Church, the Papacy—I thought you were not in the Church," I said. "No, I am an atheist," replied Serafino. "But what has that to do with this? Look at those eyes, those lips. In '48, when my soul was torn, I used to come in here every day just for the consolation of that face. And now I come for the memory and the peace it brings me." Slow tears were on the lower lids of his eyes. With a rough hand he brushed them away, then asked me: "What do you think?" "I love that face," I replied. "I understand how you feel."

A friendship grew up between Serafino and me. He was not a perfunctory guide. He never grew tired. When five o'clock would come and the day was really ended I would say: "Well I must be back now. Little Reverdy is coming over for an early dinner." "Ah, but just this one picture," he would say, "it will only take a few minutes. I want you to see this. It is a great work and something may happen. I may forget to bring you again." Then we would walk in and out of the cold and gloom of the church after having stared the picture into vividness.

During my morning work my friendship with Mrs. Winchell ripened rapidly. We had an excellent start in the circumstance that we were Americans. We knew of cities, of some people in common. Abigail had come from Connecticut and that, in a sense, laid a foundation for our conversations. We were working together, she with painting, I with drawing and etching. We criticized and suggested concerning each other's work. Or we put down our brushes and pencils and talked of life. In this way at last she knew of my going to America as a youth of eighteen, of the farm, of Zoe, of my marriage, my life in Chicago, my long friendship with Douglas, and lastly of Dorothy's death at sea. Her eyes would look intently into mine. And when I told her that I considered my life practically wasted she said: "Do you know every one's life is wasted; nearly every one. Few find their work and pursue it. Most of us are drawn aside, or tripped, or blinded. Your friend Douglas seems to me to have had a wasted life. As you tell me all this I see you as a man of tremendous will drawn into an accidental path, not his real path. You are an artist at heart. I don't mean that you will ever be a great etcher, though one cannot tell; I mean that all this turbulence, sordidness, American hurry, waste, vulgarity, agitation, politics, did not belong to you. But what right have I to talk? My life is a waste too."

Little by little I learned from her what her life had been, what its central impulse was. She was a poor girl who hungered for opportunity. She had looked with critical eyes upon marriageable men. I wondered if she had been attractive to many men, if many had had the discernment to see what she was. If a young woman marries an elderly man of wealth it is probable that no young man of wealth has come to her at the favorable hour; and probable, too, that no man of merely compelling magnetism has been interested in her. Mr. Winchell was kindly, a noble nature; he gave her a tender, but only a paternal love. But through him she had traveled; she had had the beauty of life for which her heart was insatiable. There were no children; there never would be children, and what lavish, ecstatic affection she bestowed upon my Reverdy! So day by day I learned that she was a teacher in Connecticut when Mr. Winchell came along, willing to give her everything if she would marry him. He had been rather a heavy drinker up to this time, now five years before; when he left off drink for awhile. Then he had begun again, but rarely indulged to excess. It may be that drink had emasculated him before he married her; but now if because of this he tippled occasionally, he was justified in medicine which dulled feelings that he could not be a husband to this radiant woman, who treated him always with such tenderness and devotion, always honored him with such scrupulous attention.

She wanted a child above all things. All of us remember some woman whom we knew in youth who kept canaries, or raised flowers or had some queer little fad. We learn to know why women do this. In her case she expressed her mother's passion in studies, in art, in travel, in friendship, in kindness to every one; above all in devotion to her husband. She mothered him in the most tender and beautiful way. In a little while I knew all her story, as she did mine.

Serafino came for me one morning at the studio. There was an old café beyond the walls near the Campagna where the food was wholly Italian and of the best. It was a wonderful place for the rest of the noonday meal, for a view of the Alban hills. The sun was warm, the sky was clear. The intoxication of an Italian day was in the air. I wished so much to share the delight with someone. Mrs. Winchell was sitting near absorbed in her work. But she had looked up and bowed to Serafino, whom she had seen with me so frequently. I turned to her and asked: "Would you and Mr. Winchell like to join me?" "Let us go and ask him," she replied. So we set off to the pension to invite Uncle Tom. That was the name she called him, and I had begun to use it myself.

Uncle Tom had made the acquaintance of some men of his own age from New York. They had begun to patronize a café located beyond the American Embassy, where broiled chicken and fresh vegetables were a specialty and where the red wine was of the best. He had an engagement with these cronies and was preparing to leave as we came in. He listened to Isabel's exclamations about the place to which Serafino wished to take us. If she had been his daughter and I had been his son he could not have sent us off together with a heartier laugh, a more undisturbed heart. "You two go," he said. "You get along about pictures and scenery. I am going to Canape's, and play checkers this afternoon. I am too fat to run around like you young folks do. Go on and have a good time."

And we ran down, following Serafino who had preceded us to engage a carriage. Off we drove, the wheels rattling over the stones, past the Forum, past the Coliseum, in view of St. Peter's. Soon we entered a dusty road. The houses were small now, broken and old. At last we drew up into an open space surrounded by little buildings: a blacksmith's shop where the anvil was ringing, little bakeries, markets where vegetables and bologna were vended. Ragged Italian children, gay and soiled with healthy dirt, were playing in the dust, turning somersaults, chasing each other, laughing. Beyond us was the Campagna, the Alban hills. We climbed a rickety stairway to a platform or roof of stone. An eager and obliging waiter brought us a table, spread it, put before us red wine. And Serafino, seeing these things done, disappeared, leaving Isabel and me to dine together under this clear sky with the green of the lovely plain spread out before us to the purples of the hills.

How could I help but make comparisons between Isabel and Dorothy? I had never known any women but Dorothy and Abigail, Sarah, Mother Clayton. I had never come into romantic contact with any woman but Dorothy. Now I was advancing to this relationship with Isabel. I began to wonder if I had given Dorothy love. I had given her perfect loyalty. Was there a form of treason to Dorothy's memory in the fast beating of my heart here in the presence of Isabel, under this sky, in this charming place? Perhaps I had been starved too. Yet because of her personality, the radiant flame which was herself, the laughing and girlish genius which was in her, but above all the spiritual integrity which was hers, I stood in awe of her. But that awe was sufficiently explained by her devotion to her husband. I saw in her eyes honor and truth, and the peace of mind that sometimes comes with them, all the while that I felt the blood surge around my heart and pulsate in my hands. There seemed to be nothing now of which we could not speak. Her interest in children betrayed itself in exclamations over the ragged little Italians playing in the court. I wondered if my heart had ever been profoundly stirred. I had married Dorothy. But suppose Zoe had not been in my life to have offended and alienated Dorothy's interest for a time, and thus to have energized this English will which was mine for conquest of the farm, for the killing of Lamborn—for the continued pursuit of Dorothy? In such case had I married Dorothy? What would life have been to me if I had met Isabel when I first knew Dorothy? This woman of white flame talking of art, of travel, of Rome, of religion, of beauty; giving way to girlish chuckles and laughter. Was she not closer to me, as temperate genius of the North, than Dorothy, out of the languor and the romanticism of the South? Was not Douglas closer to the North, which Isabel seemed to me now to symbolize, than to that South with which his fate had now so long been entangled?