lling brat upon his knee, is
scarcely calculated to make the best of men more of "an ornament to
society." Constant contact with sharpers and constant effort to be
sharper than they is equally as apt to blunt his sense of delicacy as
it is to unfit one for higher responsibilities of official station. So
it was not unnatural that that society of Washington, based wholly on
politics, was not found wholly clean. But under the seething
surface--first visible to the casual glance--was a substratum as pure
as it was solid and unyielding.

Habitues of twenty years remarked that, with all the giddy whirl of
previous winters in the outer circle, none had approached in mad
rapidity that of 1860-61. The rush of aimless visiting, matinees and
dinners, balls and suppers, followed each other without cessation;
dress and diamonds, equipage and cards, all cost more than ever before.
This might be the last of it, said an uneasy sense of the coming storm;
and in the precedent sultriness, the thousands who had come to make
money vied with the tens who came to spend it in mad distribution of
the proceeds. Madame, who had made an immense investment of somebody's
capital in diamonds and lace, must let the world see them. Mademoiselle
must make a certain exhibit of shapely shoulders and of telling stride
in the German; and time was shortening fast. And Knower, of the Third
House, had put all the proceeds of engineering that last bill through,
into gorgeous plate. It would never do to waste it, for Knower meant
business; and this might be the end of the thing.

So the stream rushed on, catching the weak and timid ones upon its
brink and plunging them into the whirling vortex. And still the rusty
old wheels revolved, as creakily as ever, at the Capital. Blobb, of
Oregon, made machine speeches to the sleepy House, but neither he, nor
they, noted the darkening atmosphere without. Senator Jenks took his
half-hourly "nip" with laudable punctuality, thereafter rising eloquent
to call Mr. President's attention to that little bill; and all the
while that huge engine, the lobby, steadily pumped away in the
political basement, sending streams of hot corruption into every artery
of the government.

Suddenly a sullen reverberation echoes over the Potomac from the South.
The long-threatened deed is done at last. South Carolina has seceded,
and the first link is rudely stricken from the chain.

There is a little start; that is all. The Third House stays