ence of a child.
Gentle words and wishes became the rule; a glimmer of reverence and a
thought of piety were not unknown in that little chamber.

"Dog my skin!" said Jeems Bee, "if I ever made a 'pintment that give me
sech satisfaction! I feel as if I had sot a nigger free!"

The youthful abstractionist, Lowndes Cleburn, expressed it even better.
"Crutch," he said, "is like a angel reduced to his bones. Them air
wings or pinions, that he might have flew off with, being a pair of
crutches, keeps him here to tarry awhile in our service. But,
gentlemen, he's not got long to stay. His crutches is growing too heavy
for that expandin' sperit. Some day we'll look up and miss him through
our tears."

They gave him many a present; they put a silver watch in his pocket,
and dressed him in a jacket with gilt buttons. He had a bouquet of
flowers to take home every day to that marvelous sister of whom he
spoke so often; and there were times when the whole committee, seeing
him drop off to sleep as he often did through frail and weary nature,
sat silently watching lest he might be wakened before his rest was
over. But no persuasion could take him off the floor of Congress. In
that solemn old Hall of Representatives, under the semicircle of gray
columns, he darted with agility from noon to dusk, keeping speed upon
his crutches with the healthiest of the pages, and racing into the
document-room, and through the dark and narrow corridors of the old
Capitol loft, where the House library was lost in twilight. Visitors
looked with interest and sympathy at the narrow back and body of this
invalid child, whose eyes were full of bright, beaming spirit. He
sometimes nodded on the steps by the Speaker's chair; and these spells
of dreaminess and fatigue increased as his disease advanced upon his
wasting system. Once he did not awaken at all until adjournment. The
great Congress and audience passed out, and the little fellow still
slept, with his head against the Clerk's desk, while all the other
pages were grouped around him, and they finally bore him off to the
committee-room in their arms, where, among the sympathetic watchers,
was old Beau. When Uriel opened his eyes the old mendicant was looking
into them.

"Ah! little Major," he said, "poor Beau has been waiting for you to
take those bad words back. Old Beau thought it was all bob with his
little cove."

"Beau," said the boy, "I've had such a dream! I thought my dear father,
who is w