ive us a majority, we telegraphed to our northern returning officers
to make the vote of their districts such and such, thereby overbalancing
the adverse returns and giving the State to us. This was done, and as I
am now senator I have a right to suppose that what I did was approved. I
am not proud of the transaction, but I would do it again, and worse than
that, if I thought it would save this country from disunion. But of
course I did not expect Mr. Carrington to approve it. I believe he was
then carrying out his reform principles by bearing arms against the
government."

"Yes!" said Carrington drily; "you got the better of me, too. Like the
old Scotchman, you didn't care who made the people's wars provided you
made its ballots."

Carrington had missed his point. The man who has committed a murder for
his country, is a patriot and not an assassin, even when he receives a
seat in the Senate as his share of the plunder. Women cannot be expected
to go behind the motives of that patriot who saves his country and his
election in times of revolution.

Carrington's hostility to Ratcliffe was, however, mild, when compared
with that felt by old Baron Jacobi. Why the baron should have taken so
violent a prejudice it is not easy to explain, but a diplomatist and a
senator are natural enemies, and Jacobi, as an avowed admirer of
Mrs. Lee, found Ratcliffe in his way. This prejudiced and immoral old
diplomatist despised and loathed an American senator as the type
which, to his bleared European eyes, combined the utmost pragmatical
self-assurance and overbearing temper with the narrowest education and
the meanest personal experience that ever existed in any considerable
government. As Baron Jacobi's country had no special relations with that
of the United States, and its Legation at Washington was a mere job to
create a place for Jacobi to fill, he had no occasion to disguise his
personal antipathies, and he considered himself in some degree as having
a mission to express that diplomatic contempt for the Senate which his
colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to conceal. He performed his
duties with conscientious precision. He never missed an opportunity to
thrust the sharp point of his dialectic rapier through the joints of the
clumsy and hide-bound senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully
exposing to Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance.
His conversation at such times sparkled with historical allus