ow that I have what they call second sight?"

The old gentleman laughed amiably. "It would seem so," he said, and sent
me about my business without further inquiry.

V

In the National Capital the winter of 1860-61 was both stormy and
nebulous. Parties were at sea. The Northerners in Congress had learned
the trick of bullying from the Southerners. In the Senate, Chandler was
a match for Toombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and
Lamar. All of them, more or less, were playing a game. If sectional war,
which was incessantly threatened by the two extremes, had been keenly
realized and seriously considered it might have been averted. Very few
believed that it would come to actual war.

A convention of Border State men, over which ex-President John Tyler
presided, was held in Washington. It might as well have been held at
the North Pole. Moderate men were brushed aside, their counsels whistled
down the wind. There was a group of Senators, headed by Wigfall of
Texas, who meant disunion and war, and another group, headed by Seward,
Hale and Chase, who had been goaded up to this. Reading contemporary
history and, seeing the high-mightiness with which the Germans began
what we conceive their raid upon humanity, we are wont to regard it
as evidence of incredible stupidity, whereas it was, in point of fact,
rather a miscalculation of forces. That was the error of the secession
leaders. They refused to count the cost. Yancey firmly believed that
England would be forced to intervene. The mills of Lancashire he thought
could not get on without Southern cotton. He was sent abroad. He found
Europe solid against slavery and therefore set against the Confederacy.
He came home with what is called a broken heart--the dreams of a
lifetime shattered--and, in a kind of dazed stupor, laid himself down to
die. With Richmond in flames and the exultant shouts of the detested yet
victorious Yankees in his ears, he did die.

Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey.
A man big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad
provincialism of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He
believed wholly the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a
constitutional right; that African slavery was ordained of God; that the
South was paramount, the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had
learned more than Yancey--was an abler man than Jefferson Davis--and
but for his affec