torial position,
preferring to remain at the law."

"And so they are going into the house?" she asked presently.

"No," said the Colonel. "Whipple refused point-blank to go to the
country. He said that he would be shirking the only work of his life
likely to be worth anything. So the Brices remain in town."

Colonel Carvel sighed. But Virginia said nothing.

CHAPTER X.

RICHTER'S SCAR

This was the summer when Mr. Stephen Brice began to make his appearance
in public. The very first was rather encouraging than otherwise, although
they were not all so. It was at a little town on the outskirts of the
city where those who had come to scoff and jeer remained to listen.

In writing that speech Stephen had striven to bear in mind a piece of
advice which Mr. Lincoln had given him. "Speak so that the lowest may
understand, and the rest will have no trouble." And it had worked. At the
halting lameness of the beginning an egg was thrown,--fortunately wide of
the mark. After this incident Stephen fairly astonished his audience,
--especially an elderly gentleman who sat on a cracker-box in the rear, out
of sight of the stand. This may have been Judge Whipple, although we have
no proof of the fact.

Stephen himself would not have claimed originality for that speech. He
laughs now when it is spoken of, and calls it a boyish effort, which it
was. I have no doubt that many of the master's phrases slipped in, as
young Mr. Brice could repeat most of the Debates, and the Cooper Union
speech by heart. He had caught more than the phrasing, however. So imbued
was he with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln that his hearers caught it; and
that was the end of the rotten eggs and the cabbages. The event is to be
especially noted because they crowded around him afterward to ask
questions. For one thing, he had not mentioned abolition. Wasn't it true,
then, that this Lincoln wished to tear the negro from his master, give
him a vote and a subsidy, and set him up as the equal of the man that
owned him? "Slavery may stay where it is," cried the young orator. "If it
is content there, so are we content. What we say is that it shall not go
one step farther. No, not one inch into a northern territory."

On the next occasion Mr. Brice was one of the orators at a much larger
meeting in a garden in South St. Louis. The audience was mostly German.
And this was even a happier event, inasmuch as Mr. Brice was able to
trace with some skill the history