rvant out, the young Senator emptied his
mouth of a large piece of tobacco into a monster spittoon that a blind
man could hardly miss, and, with a face still long and silent, and much
at variance with his previous spontaneity, he absently inquired:

"What can he want? what can he want?"

One of the small negro children had meantime toddled in at the door,
and, with large, liquid eyes in its solemn, desirous face, laid hands on
the fiddle and looked up at Mr. Clayton.

"Bless the little child!" he suddenly said. "Wants a tune? Well!"

Placing himself in a large chair, the young Senator tilted it back till
his hard, squarish head rested against the mantel, and he felt along the
strings almost purposelessly, till the plaintive air came forth:

"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon!
How can ye bloom so fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I so full of care?

Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings beside thy mate;
For so I sat, and so I sang,
And wist not of my fate."

He closed his eyes on the strains, and a thickening at his throat, and
movement of his broad, athletic chest, as he continued the air, showed
that he was inwardly laboring with some strong emotion.

His cousin, the Chief-justice, made a signal with his hat, and one by
one the sitters stole out into the square noiselessly, and went their
ways, leaving the young man playing on, with the negro child at his
knee, leaning there as if to spy out the living voice in his violin.

Other children came to the door--white children from the square, black
children from the garden--and some ventured a little way in to hear the
tender wooing of the sympathetic strings. He moved his bow mechanically,
but the music sprang forth as if it knew its sister, Grief, was waiting
on the chords. At last a bolder child than the rest came and pushed his
elbow and said,

"Papa!"

"My boy, my dear boy!" the fiddler cried, as tears streamed down his
cheeks, and he lifted the lad to his heart and kissed him.

Judge Custis, though no word passed upon the subject, saw the solitary
canker at the Senator's heart--his wife's dead form in the old
Presbyterian kirk-yard.

It was soon apparent to Judge Custis, from this and other silent things,
that a light-hearted, affectionate, strong, yet womanly, engine of
energy constituted the young Delaware lawyer-politician. Keen, cunning,
impulsive, hopeful, his feet provincial, his head among the