Mr. Booth kept his own counsel in Canada, had it understood that he was engaged to be married to the daughter of a Republican statesman, and he bought a bill of exchange for three hundred dollars at a Montreal bank, saying he was going to run the blockade to the South.

CHAPTER XLII.

LEGITIMATE DRAMA.

KATY BOSLER was the mistress of Abel Quantrell's house in Baltimore. The old man took a sardonic joy in his grandchild, which he named Winter, in honor of his Congressman friend, and to mark its want of fatherly care. He seemed the prouder of this boy because it was disowned, and the tenderer to Katy because she was abandoned.

He never mentioned Lloyd's name; and once, when Hannah Ritner spoke for the absent boy, declaring that he had never disobeyed his father, but had kept in fact and spirit within the regular lines of the insurrection, the old man took down the writings of Franklin, and pointed to the words:

"Nothing has ever hurt me so much as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son, and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune, and life were all at stake. . . . The part he acted against me in the war will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.

"My son is my son till he gets him a wife,

But my daughter is my daughter all the days of her life." "

These were the words of Franklin concerning his natural son: Abel Quantrell might have forgiven his natural son for a similar course, but his legitimate son seemed to him in the rights of legitimacy to possess no rights of pathos; by the law he judged Lloyd, like a Jew by his Jewish code, and Edgar Pittson, his natural son, he judged as Paul judged the Gentile Timothy, "my own son in the faith."

He divided his property, while yet alive, between Katy Bosler and Light Pittson.

Lloyd's own property in Maryland was now a confiscated waste, and he possessed nothing but the gun in his hands.

There arose, however, for the absent one a second motherhood. The fervid abolitionist, Hannah Ritner, adopted Lloyd Quantrell in her heart, and clothed him in the panoply of her prayers.

She had nurtured the hope that she might yet find it consistent to marry Abel Quantrell, for the sake of her grandchild Light Pittson, who was innocent of the lapse in her family pride and name; but the obduracy of her lover toward his acknowledged son settled the question in Hannah Ritner's mind.

"Edgar," this strange and homeless woman said, "if I have been unjust to you already, I must be more unjust still. You are abundantly blessed with popularity, public influence, and the right convictions; your brother Lloyd has none of these; he is poor, obscure, and wrong. Shall I take from him the pride of his descent, also? If you are Abel Quantrell's lawful son, Lloyd Quantrell has not even the memory of his mother to inherit. One of you must wear the stain."

"Mother, I am the older. Can you ask how I shall answer?” the senator replied. "I know what is in your heart, and its tenderness is in my veins. No mess of pottage will I cook for my hunterbrother to defraud him of the precious inheritance of his mother's fame and our father's repute. My pedigree shall be from immaculate freedom, working its miracles in you, the purest of loving souls, and blessing my descent with relationship to every detached and fatherless child of God."

Quiet as childhood he kissed her brow, and took her worn and bruised frame into his arms, and sang her the tunes she had never been blessed to sing to him nor rock him to sleep in the cradle of domestic happiness. The pilgrim mother, seeking everywhere to do the penance of duty, sacrifice, and alms in lonely places or on dangerous tasks, closed her eyes upon her tears of enthusiasm and sorrow, and slept in the arms of her consoling son.

The penalty of their integrity was still to be paid.

One day in the Senate the new amendment to the American Constitution-the thirteenth in number, like the number of the English colonies in America-was to be debated. It abolished slavery, and compelled Congress to enforce that emancipation which now existed only in the President's proclamation and as a measure of

war.

President Lincoln was deeply interested in the passage of this amendment, and came to the Senate to hear the debate; and a noble audience was there collected of the fashion and public intellect of the country.

Senator Pittson was the debater of whom the reasoning work was expected, to persuade other border-State senators to vote for the bill, like Mr. Reverdy Johnson, who had been sent to the Senate from Maryland by Henry Winter Davis.* But there were some bitter opponents of the measure there, and one of these, claiming some merit of originating justice for his party, was reminded by Edgar Pittson of the person who published some poetry as “original,” and when called to task replied that it was marked “ original" in the newspaper he took it from.

The opposing senator, intemperate of habits and speech, rose and exclaimed:

"If I were to quote anything from that senator, I should mark it' ANONYMOUS.''

The brutal reference to a mooted illegitimacy or unauthenticity of Edgar Pittson caused a low ripple of laughter and stamping feet to emanate from the more degraded spectators in the galleries.

Booth had heard this story, and he watched Light Pittson and her mother, sitting near him, the latter scarlet and the former laughing with others, unconscious of any imputation.

Ha!" exclaimed Booth aloud, "he'll feel that, on his daughter's account."

A woman before him turned and said:

"You speak false, sir! He will not feel it at all.”

He recognized the face of the dark woman who had bound his arms at Nelly Harbaugh's lodgings.

Looking again, Booth saw the President, the senators, the foreign ministers, and everybody, deeply interested and watching.

A vacant chair on the Senate floor, by Edgar Pittson's side, had been occupied temporarily by Abel Quantrell, who now slowly rose, leaned upon his cane, and put his remaining hand into his bosom, like one standing to be counted in a vote. His face was white as plaster; his under lip was folded upon the upper; he bent his head and looked at his unavowed son.

Then, without a sign of passion, or any deeper expression than

* Maryland, through Reverdy Johnson, voted for the amendment.

contempt for his coarse opponent, the Western senator sketched the sufficiency of slavery to insult the progeny of its own licentiousness. Amendments had been offered that no descendants of Africans should be citizens, and that "no person whose mother or grandmother is or was a negro shall be a citizen, or eligible to any place of trust or profit."

For the first time, the young senator said, the mothers of the American people had been arraigned in the Senate. The expiring throes of slavery, in the pillory rebellion had brought it to, exemplified its genius in that all who were helpless-innocent sons or aged mothers, dark or white-fell beneath the curse of its drunken rage; like Noah, exposed in his cups, hurling the stigma of his own shame at his grandchild. For half a century the proposition had been maintained that the helplessness of one race of women was the only security for the virtue of the other; and wherever this spirit saw a woman toiling, it insulted her with a suspicion of her honor, making industry the yoke-fellow of shame, and canonizing sloth among the vestals of religion.

The American senator laid down the broad proposition that there was not an untainted pedigree or descent upon the globe. In every great migration or incursion the women fell to the conqueror, and slavery spared no refinement, but rejoiced in the high-breeding of its victims, until the abuses of Christian women at the hands of a religion which denied all women souls, expelled the Moor and created at once Isabella and Columbus-Europe and the virgin world it came to wed. As long as the African slave-trade prevailed by law, the women of America were subject to capture and degradation by the Moors; in the eye of Heaven the sufferings of the one in the harem and the other in the barracoon were the same. Presuming upon a few generations of putative descent, caste, dating back to the Norman Goth and his villein's unconsulted daughter,* found its nearest imitators in the New World among the weedlings and swamp-flowers of yesterday, the very orthography of whose names was lost, and in whose custody, perhaps, the immemorial princesses of Africa bore them a posterity whose lineage had been older than

*"Of all princely lines the ducal house of Normandy paid least regard to the canonical laws of marriage, or to the special claims of legitimate birth. William the Norman was emphatically William the Bastard. Throughout the whole of Duke Robert's life she remained in the position of an acknowledged mistress."-Freeman's "Norman Conquest."

Moses, till crossed by this alligator, in the serene complacency of his appetites.

The reference was obvious, and, as the unfortunate senator rose to apologize, his opponent held him up by the wand of his subtle finger, and illustrated with him, as Ariel might have lectured upon Caliban.

All saw the relative quality of the two exemplars: Pittson, the son of Mercury; in every globule of light a thought reflected, in every motion some sign of the spherical harmonies, his words the unconscious flakes of an agitation as gentle as the snow-fall, his client the ages of humankind in their loving evolutions from the one unfailing fountain of every perfect aristocracy-a mother's woes!

Of that rock of origin sure, he had the model of every tribe before him, and the nerve of every noble feeling was in his heart. Honoring his father and his mother, the whole land became his personal heritage according to the promise of God. If the barbarous Crusader, knowing no alphabet, could ride to Palestine to redeem the sepulchre of a lawgiver who was fatherless in the world, the son of two venerable spectators might be a paladin, indeed, in the lists where four million souls were this day to come into the genesis of nations, and be accountable to some parentage.

The other in this bright light-as from the Grail, which administered a holy communion to the nations-felt his rankness and low presumption sting himself, like a nettle shrinking upon the parterre. The man he had imputed dishonor to, shone by him like a knight above a toad.

"the

"Even from that source," said the senator, after a pause, little children, white or yellow, cry, 'Heureuse à vivre!' and thank Nature for the gift of life. To live: it is all we are sure of. So glad of life are we that we would live forever and again. In every tree the birds sing, 'Life!' in every swamp the chorus of life is certain as the night. Give life, my brother; release from the bondage of your prejudices and the oppressions of your laws, and we shall start the world from this hour with every man the Norman conqueror !"

At the conclusion of the debate the whole Senate crowded about the senator; the doors were thrown open, and mothers and daughters entered to shake Mr. Pittson's hand. A generous age, brought slowly to the incentive of a magnanimous deed, felt the touch of nature like a tongue of flame, make all see and speak in the glow of liberty. The great President himself, whose legal authenticity