sed yoke.

With a new administration, Civil Service Reform came in, crude and
ill-digested, as all sudden and sweeping reforms must be; cruel to the
individual, as all crude reforms will ever be; and among the list of
helpless men and women, incapacitated for other work by long service in
the dull routine of federal office, who were decapitated, the weak,
foolish, emaciated head of Expectant Dobbs went to the block. It
afterward appeared that the gifted Gashwiler was responsible for the
appointment of twenty clerks, and that the letter of poor Dobbs, in
which he dared to refer to the now powerless Gashwiler, had sealed his
fate. The country made an example of Gashwiler and--Dobbs.

From that moment he disappeared. I looked for him in vain in
anterooms, lobbies, and hotel corridors, and finally came to the
conclusion that he had gone home.

How beautiful was that July Sabbath, when the morning train from
Baltimore rolled into the Washington depot. How tenderly and chastely
the morning sunlight lay on the east front of the Capitol until the
whole building was hushed in a grand and awful repose. How difficult it
was to think of a Gashwiler creeping in and out of those enfiling
columns, or crawling beneath that portico, without wondering that yon
majestic figure came not down with flat of sword to smite the fat
rotundity of the intruder. How difficult to think that parricidal
hands have ever been lifted against the Great Mother, typified here in
the graceful white chastity of her garments, in the noble tranquillity
of her face, in the gathering up her white-robed children within her
shadow.

This led me to think of Dobbs, when, suddenly a face flashed by my
carriage window. I called to the driver to stop, and, looking again,
saw that it was a woman standing bewildered and irresolute on the
street corner. As she turned her anxious face toward me I saw that it
was Mrs. Dobbs.

What was she doing here, and where was Expectant?

She began an incoherent apology, and then burst into explanatory tears.
When I had got her in the carriage she said, between her sobs, that
Expectant had not returned; that she had received a letter from a
friend here saying he was sick,--oh very, very sick,--and father could
not come with her, so she came alone. She was so frightened, so
lonely, so miserable.

Had she his address?

Yes, just here! It was on the outskirts of Washington, near
Georgetown. Then I would take her there,