?"

"I never expected to taste it on earth. I've only dreamed about it on
high."

"It's only terrapin stew. We serve it as a soup."

"The angels made it."

"No, Aunt Hannah."

"I won't take it back. Angels only could brew this soup."

The terrapin was followed by old Virginia ham and turnip greens. And
then came the turkey with chestnut stuffing and jellies. The long table,
flashing with old china and silver, held the staples of ham and turkey
as ornaments as well as dainties for the palate. The real delicacies
were served later, the ducks which Doyle had sent the Colonel, and plate
after plate of little, brown, juicy birds called sora, so tender and
toothsome they could be eaten bones and all.

When Phil wound up with cakes and custards, apples, pears and nuts from
the orchard and fields, his mind was swimming in a dream of luxury. And
over it all the spirit of true hospitality brooded. A sense of home and
reality as intimate, as genuine as if he sat beside his mother's chair
in the little cottage in Ohio.

"Lord save me," he breathed. "If I stay here long I'll have but one
hope, to own a plantation and a home like this--"

Toombs sat on Lee's right and Douglas on his left. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor
occupied the places of honor beside Mrs. Lee.

The Colonel's keen eye studied Douglas with untiring patience. To his
rising star, the man who loved the Union, was drawn as by a magnet.
Toombs, the Whig, belonged to his own Party, the aristocracy of brains
and the inheritors of the right to leadership. He was studying Toombs
with growing misgivings. He dreaded the radicalism within the heart of
the Southern Whig.

His eye rested on Sam, serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's
absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the
spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw
the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling
uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of
self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in
shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the
wit and intelligence of the two leaders at his side.

Over this dusky figure, from the dawn of American history our fathers
had wrangled and compromised. More than once he had threatened to divide
or destroy the Union. Reason and the compromises of great minds had
saved us. In Sam he saw this grinning skeleton at his feast.

He could d