m, gleamed and flashed with light--more than ten
thousand jets poured their rays through its windows, besides the
innumerable lights that circled the mighty dome within and without.

Margaret stopped, and Phil felt her soft hand grip his arm with sudden
emotion.

"Isn't it sublime!" she whispered.

"Glorious!" he echoed.

But he was thinking of the pressure of her hand on his arm and the subtle
tones of her voice. Somehow he felt that the light came from her eyes. He
forgot the Capitol and the surging crowds before the sweeter creative
wonder silently growing in his soul.

"And yet," she faltered, "when I think of what all this means for our
people at home--their sorrow and poverty and ruin--you know it makes me
faint."

Phil's hand timidly sought the soft one resting on his arm and touched it
reverently.

"Believe me, Miss Margaret, it will be all for the best in the end. The
South will yet rise to a nobler life than she has ever lived in the past.
This is her victory as well as ours."

"I wish I could think so," she answered.

They passed the City Hall and saw across its front, in giant letters of
fire thirty feet deep, the words:

"UNION, SHERMAN, AND GRANT"

On Pennsylvania Avenue the hotels and stores had hung every window,
awning, cornice, and swaying tree-top with lanterns. The grand avenue was
bridged by tri-coloured balloons floating and shimmering ghostlike far up
in the dark sky. Above these, in the blacker zone toward the stars, the
heavens were flashing sheets of chameleon flames from bursting rockets.

Margaret had never dreamed such a spectacle. She walked in awed silence,
now and then suppressing a sob for the memory of those she had loved and
lost. A moment of bitterness would cloud her heart, and then with the
sense of Phil's nearness, his generous nature, the beauty and goodness of
his sister, and all they owed to her for Ben's life, the cloud would
pass.

At every public building, and in front of every great hotel, bands were
playing. The wild war strains, floating skyward, seemed part of the
changing scheme of light. The odour of burnt powder and smouldering
rockets filled the warm spring air.

The deep bay of the great fort guns now began to echo from every hilltop
commanding the city, while a thousand smaller guns barked and growled from
every square and park and crossing.

Jay Cooke & Co's. banking-house had stretched across its front, in
enormous blazing letters, the words: