s of a few
families and cherished as relics of the past.

Washington, choked with scrofulous wealth, bowed the knee to the Almighty
Dollar. The new altar was covered with a black mould of human blood--but
no questions were asked.

A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation and
received his guests with condescension.

In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the struggle
between the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of the
South approached its climax.

The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralyzed.
Two years after the close of a victorious war the credit of the Republic
dropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market for
seventy-three cents on the dollar.

The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single step
of the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator in
the White House.

A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, heal
the wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the Union of the
fathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of the
Nation. Members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, protesting Senators and
Congressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroes
of both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group of
famous negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall, arm in arm
with ex-slaveholders from South Carolina, the great meeting rose and walls
and roof rang with thunder peals of applause.

Their committee, headed by a famous editor, journeyed to Washington to
appeal to the Master at the Capitol. They sought him not in the White
House, but in the little Black House in an obscure street on the hill.

The brown woman received them with haughty dignity, and said:

"Mr. Stoneman cannot be seen at this hour. It is after nine o'clock. I
will submit to him your request for an audience to-morrow morning."

"We must see him to-night," replied the editor, with rising anger.

"The king is amusing himself," said the yellow woman, with a touch of
malice.

"Where is he?"

Her catlike eyes rolled from side to side, and a smile played about her
full lips as she said:

"You will find him at Hall & Pemberton's gambling hell--you've lived in
Washington. You know the way."

With a muttered oath the editor turned on his heel and led his two
companions to the old