Will rise in might to exterminate
The leaders of this accursed Rebellion."

Farther along swung the black-draped banner:

"Justice to Traitors
is
Mercy to the People."

Another flapped its grim message:

"The Barbarism of Slavery.
Can Barbarism go Further?"

Across the Ninth Regiment Armoury, in gigantic letters, were the words:

"Time for Weeping
But Vengeance is not Sleeping!"

When the procession reached Buffalo, the house of Millard Fillmore was
mobbed because the ex-President, stricken on a bed of illness, had
neglected to drape his house in mourning. The procession passed to
Springfield through miles of bowed heads dumb with grief. The plough
stopped in the furrow, the smith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his
plane, the merchant closed his door, the clink of coin ceased, and over
all hung brooding silence with low-muttered curses, fierce and
incoherent.

No man who walked the earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm
of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were
tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of
Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had
conquered, look down on its like even in France.

And now that its pomp was done and its memory but bitterness and ashes,
but one man knew exactly what he wanted and what he meant to do. Others
were stunned by the blow. But the cold eyes of the Great Commoner, leader
of leaders, sparkled, and his grim lips smiled. From him not a word of
praise or fawning sorrow for the dead. Whatever he might be, he was not a
liar: when he hated, he hated.

The drooping flags, the city's black shrouds, processions, torches, silent
seas of faces and bared heads, the dirges and the bells, the dim-lit
churches, wailing organs, fierce invectives from the altar, and the
perfume of flowers piled in heaps by silent hearts--to all these was he
heir.

And more--the fierce unwritten, unspoken, and unspeakable horrors of the
war itself, its passions, its cruelties, its hideous crimes and
sufferings, the wailing of its women, the graves of its men--all these now
were his.

The new President bowed to the storm. In one breath he promised to fulfil
the plans of Lincoln. In the next h