the city; some United States artillery and some German companies from Pennsylvania having marched through that afternoon, despite threats, insults, and ruffianism, to protect the national capital. The nature of that meeting was black and insurrectionary, and Quantrell joined his military friends right afterward; and the bottle was the presiding genius there as everywhere.

He could not find his father; but Light Pittson was in the house, and Lloyd told her he was committed to leave for Virginia at call. The girl, unacquainted with more than the spirit of the hour, commended his resolution.

Next day Lloyd arose late, and heard a wild din in the

streets.

“The Yankees! The myrmidons! More of them are coming."

He drew on his clothes, and fell in with the mongrel swarm of tatterdemalions and bravoes—the unthinking, the pale, and the fierce -and they swept him toward the harbor of the city, where the floodtide bore the bowsprits of ships nearly across that street where the one track of a railroad alone connected the capital of the Union with the great States of the North, just risen from the swoon of the news of disunion.

The rioters were marching on that track thousands strong, as if Jones's Falls and its pollution had burst, and were deluging the quays.

Quantrell learned that a portion of a Northern "army” had just been hauled through the town in cars by horses; but that some fragments had remained behind, and that these were now to be murdered. People were already tearing up the track and piling stones and ship-anchors in the streets.

In a few minutes a moving coherence of some kind was seen at a place in the broad street, where a bridge crossed the great open sewer of the city. It seemed like a stone wall moving yet crumbling, and at the head of it waved a sort of color or flag, torn and gay and dirty. The air was mottled with things that seemed to be tossed out of a machine, or revolving like bats or butterflies in the wind.

As the moving disaster drew nearer, there was seen enveloped a little band of men staggering under arms, beaten and bloody, the air and the street spouting stones at them, and at their head a miscreant of destruction was carrying, to insult them, the new piece of

finery conceived in the Southern barracoons-the insurgent, separating, or confederated flag.

Quantrell picked up a stone.

He saw at the head of that little, tired soldiery, the mayor of the city, walking by their officer, pale and dusty, but doing his duty at the risk of his life.

The troops came so close that Lloyd could hear them panting. Their tongues were dry, like those of sheep driven without water. Here and there one would be tripped up by some coward and fall beneath his heavy and unwonted accoutrements. Yet the eyes of

all were shining at something farther on, and seeing this alone. What was it they saw?" Quantrell often asked, afterward, but could never tell. It might have been the unprotected capital of their country, or the presence of death, or the worship of a faithful posterity which could feel for their agony that day.

They numbered less than two hundred; they spoke no more than the ox going to slaughter. The Christian martyrs in the Roman arena were not beset by as many thousands nor by more ravening beasts. Yet all that these men were doing was obeying a proclamation of law and using a peaceable post-road of the country to go to their capital.

Quantrell was fascinated with the scene of duty and of dread. The stone he was holding in his hand was wrested from him, and the villain who seized it hurled it against an old man limping at the soldiery's side, with a face like the dust of battle on the skins of the dead.

That is my father!" Quantrell gasped, and rushed where the old man fell.

"Go back, sir! This is my place," a woman spoke, rising, with Abel Quantrell in her arms.

Lloyd gazed, and saw the face of Hannah Ritner, stained with his father's blood.

The butchers of the mob had now presumed too far; it had become a question of resistance or death. Hemmed in and blocked fast, stoned and spit upon, prodded with staves and stuck with awls, deserted by police and outlawed in that place of public commerce, the soldiery from near the ancient battle-field of Lexington waited for one word, and it came, at last, with nasal curtness and meaning:

"Ready!—Fire!”

Then rolled through Baltimore the echoes of Fort Sumter, and the streets, all strewed with flying scavengers, ended the war on that spot forever.

The flight of the rioters gave the police room to form in, and the volunteers of Massachusetts were molested no more, save by that local chatter which ever follows in the wake of the brave.

Lloyd's father was dangerously hurt, but the son demanded permission to see him that night.

“Father," said he, “I am going-you must know where. I little thought the first bloodshed would be upon your aged face. Wide as we differ, father, there ought to be love between us. Can you not forget the cause I go to fight for, and bless your son?”

"You will never see me again!” Abel Quantrell spoke, his face with lines of blood upon it, but the mouth firm as the dead Cid's brought from his tomb to fight the Moors. "I can not bless by my finite power. My heart has been warmed of late toward you, and if you could stay here, where Heaven should make you see your duty, affection might grow strong between us. How can I say 'God bless you,' sir, when, blessing you, I dare not ask liberty for your slaves, against whose sorrows you go to war?"

"I have anticipated that, father,” Lloyd replied. “You can bless me, sir. Here is a bill of sale of every slave I own, prepared to meet this hour and your consistency. Take it and set them free, and say, 'God bless you, Lloyd!'”

He laid the paper upon the bed.

Abel Quantrell drew his son to his face and kissed him with emotion.

"The blessing of your State go with you, when Maryland is free : my son, take my farewell from her shield, 'Crescite et multiplicamini.'

Light Pittson kissed him all her approbation.

Hannah Ritner whispered in his ear:

"When thou killest everything,

Still the turtle-dove will sing."

"Grow and multiply," the motto of Maryland.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE OLD SLAVE COUNTIES.

QUANTRELL left Baltimore, with other recruits, for the seceding or insurgent government-the two lads Arnold and O'Laughlin, already referred to as Booth's dependents, and the liquor-dealer Martin, who had business in the peninsulas below the city of Washington, where, also, were situated Quantrell's lands and slaves.

These peninsulas stretch eighty miles south of Baltimore city, and are comprised between two broad sheets of tidal water-the Chesapeake Bay coming up to Baltimore, and the great river Potomac, ceasing its tides at the city of Washington. The general peninsula is divided lengthwise by the river Patuxent, flowing halfway between the two large cities, and further compressing the land for traversable purposes to the breadth of only twenty miles east from Washington. It was forty miles by the railroad from Baltimore to Washington, and Quantrell then had forty miles to go by private conveyance before he should be able to cross into Virginia at Pope's Creek, near the old court-house town of Port Tobacco.

This Pope's Creek suggested to our traveler that the parent country of the Roman Catholic religion in the English colonies was in this old isolated district of Maryland.

While Raleigh was seeking to plant Virginia, a young Tory politician at court cut out from Raleigh's colony the province of Maryland, and introduced the old religion there in its decaying and persecuted times, after the Catholic conspiracy of Guy Fawkes. After a course of fifty years a Protestant revolution arose in Maryland, and for nearly a century the Romish worship was suppressed, or till the American War of Independence released all worships. In that interval the old faith of Queen Mary smoldered and the Lords Baltimore had professed Protestantism; but John Carroll, a priest of Rome and educated on the Continent, gathered his folds together, and brought over refugee priests from the French Revolution; and thus, in eighty years, Maryland had again become the proselytizing province of American Romanism, with its springs in Baltimore and its antiquities in the old Potomac peninsula.

Upon the edge, indeed, within the rim, of this old English Catholicism stood the American capital, and much of its population

was of the faith of Calvert and Catesby, while a Jesuit college and the oldest convent in the land overhung the city from the steeps of Georgetown. Hardly fifty thousand people remained in Washington, but soldiers were quartered in the halls of Congress, and all the railroads to the north had been destroyed the night following the riots in Baltimore.

The city of Washington stood, the melancholy monument of slavery incorporated with a democratic system, and extending through that white democracy, to the lowest man, the prejudices not of the democracy, but of the slavery. It had resisted all the efforts of Congress to make it a free district, yet slavery had spoiled its proportions, and, originally a square, it was now only the Maryland side of the square, and gave some force to Abel Quantrell's remark, every time he saw the map of the District of Columbia: "Cube it!"

There stood a long Grecian Capitol on a nearly naked hill, with the splintered drum of an iron dome, like a broken bundle of fasces, unfinished in the middle. A broad, unsightly avenue stretched from its base, between stunted rows of generally mean-looking houses, to a Treasury Department in borrowed architecture, and some other ministerial buildings, surrounding the sorrowful new. President's abode, out of whose official window he could look upon a neglected obelisk of Washington, halting like the pillar of Lot's wife till Sodom and Gomorrah should burn in chastising fire.

The same glance which showed Abraham Lincoln the decivilizing impotence of slavery showed him the new rebel flag hoisted on the Virginia hills—that Virginia whence his forefathers emigrated to the West. Lloyd had the privilege of seeing this man for the only time in his life, when the President walked, the day of Lloyd's arrival, from his white official mansion to the war building.

Lloyd and his three companions encountered a tall man, a small one, and one neither small nor tall, but wearing spectacles.

'I'll swaw," whispered Martin, “if yer ain't the devil himself!" The other lads looked up and gave room.

The tall man glanced down from a long and peculiar face, and said, with a look of most fatherly tenderness, where sorrow and sweetness seemed mixed in the cup of dignity:

'Good-morning, friends!"

The two others would not have spoken at all but for the tall man's condescension, and he with the spectacles barely noticed our