"Lord save me," he breathed. "If I stay here long I'll have but one
hope, to own a plantation and a home like this--"

Toombs sat on Lee's right and Douglas on his left. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor
occupied the places of honor beside Mrs. Lee.

The Colonel's keen eye studied Douglas with untiring patience. To his
rising star, the man who loved the Union, was drawn as by a magnet.
Toombs, the Whig, belonged to his own Party, the aristocracy of brains
and the inheritors of the right to leadership. He was studying Toombs
with growing misgivings. He dreaded the radicalism within the heart of
the Southern Whig.

His eye rested on Sam, serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's
absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the
spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw
the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling
uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of
self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in
shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the
wit and intelligence of the two leaders at his side.

Over this dusky figure, from the dawn of American history our fathers
had wrangled and compromised. More than once he had threatened to divide
or destroy the Union. Reason and the compromises of great minds had
saved us. In Sam he saw this grinning skeleton at his feast.

He could depend on the genius of Douglas when the supreme crisis came.
He felt the quality of his mind tonight. But could Douglas control the
mob impulse of the North where such appeals as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had