last visit. The Camerons are on the road to the gallows,
father and son. Lynch informs me that the murder committed last night, and
the insolent notice nailed on the courthouse door, could have come only
from their brain. They are the hereditary leaders of these people. They
alone would have the audacity to fling this crime into the teeth of the
world and threaten worse. We are face to face with Southern barbarism.
Every man now to his own standard! The house of Stoneman can have no part
with midnight assassins."

"Nor with black barbarians, father. It is a question of who possesses the
right of life and death over the citizen, the organized virtue of the
community, or its organized crime. You have mistaken for death the
patience of a generous people. We call ourselves the champions of liberty.
Yet for less than they have suffered, kings have lost their heads and
empires perished before the wrath of freemen."

"My boy, this is not a question for argument between us," said the father
with stern emphasis. "This conspiracy of terror and assassination
threatens to shatter my work to atoms. The election on which turns the
destiny of Congress, and the success or failure of my life, is but a few
weeks away. Unless this foul conspiracy is crushed, I am ruined, and the
Nation falls again beneath the heel of a slaveholders' oligarchy."

"Your nightmare of a slaveholders' oligarchy does not disturb me."

"At least you will have the decency to break your affair with Margaret
Cameron pending the issue of my struggle of life and death with her father
and brother?"

"Never."

"Then I will do it for you."

"I warn you, sir," Phil cried, with anger, "that if it comes to an issue
of race against race, I am a white man. The ghastly tragedy of the
condition of society here is something for which the people of the South
are no longer responsible----"

"I'll take the responsibility!" growled the old cynic.

"Don't ask me to share it," said the younger man emphatically.

The father winced, his lips trembled, and he answered brokenly:

"My boy, this is the bitterest hour of my life that has had little to make
it sweet. To hear such words from you is more than I can bear. I am an old
man now--my sands are nearly run. But two human beings love me, and I love
but two. On you and your sister I have lavished all the treasures of a
maimed and strangled soul--and it has come to this! Read the notice which
one of your friends thrust into t