Likewise there were chivalrous Northern men in the ranks of the Federal officers in Georgia who discharged the duties under which they acted by superior orders without sympathizing with the wrongs which were wantonly perpetrated in the name of law upon virtuous and upright citizens.

But nothing can be said in extenuation of the baser characters of reconstruction—the hordes of carpet-baggers who descended upon the State like birds of prey and the corrupt native whites who squandered the gold of self-respect for the coin of base betrayal, poisoning the minds of once loyal and sturdy blacks and sowing the seeds of angry dissensions for future harvests of regret.

This monstrous Caliban of reconstruction even dared at times to wear the holy vestments of religion; but without straining through the glass of prophecy it may be said that the only way in which such an offensive mass of corruption can ever encumber the approaches to the New Jerusalem will be to sit among the lepers who groan outside the gates. He may have supped with Dives in the halls of power but he can have no seat of honor in the halls of history; for his place will be upon the steps. Even the lapping tongues of the faithful dogs will deny him the menial offices of brute compassion; and he will linger upon the cheerless stones for eternity to punish: an unmitigated moral mendicant, redeemed by none of the soul and cursed with all of the sores of Lazarus.

S

CHAPTER XXXII.

'Almost Home" and "Home at Last.”

UFFERINGS, like sunset clouds, often beautify the couch of Death. They husband the liquid gold which the spendthrift noontide hour has lavished or the untoward midday storm obscured; and purifying it in painful crucibles, they braid it into beautiful embroideries. They become, in the language of the Norman chivalry, the Queens of Love and Beauty; and while they watch, with somber brows the grapplings of the lance, they approach, with winsome wreaths, to garland the victor of the tournament. Death drops the mask of darkness; and, donning the rose of dawn, it brightens from midnight into morning. What the poet calls the Street of Shadows becomes the Street of Sunbeams: an ethereal Via Appia whose pavements burn with richer rubies and whose arches bloom with brighter banners than ever welcomed the victorious Cæsars into Rome.

Such was the nature of the scene which marked the life's exit of Benjamin Harvey Hill.

Less than six years had elapsed, since receiving his coveted commission to represent Georgia in the Senate of the United States, he had entered for the first time the great hall of argument in which Calhoun and Clay and Webster had gloriously grappled in the giant wrestlings

of State rights. Among the intellectual gladiators whom he had met upon the floor were men like Conkling and Blaine and Carpenter and Lamar and Thurman and Voorhees; but he was intellectually the peer of them all. Later on there had come to sit beside him an ancient foe with whom he had differed and fought at almost every turn of his career, but with whom he had finally clasped hands in friendly truce: Joseph E. Brown. At last there had come an end to all discords and strifes at home.

From the start he had been a power in the Senate, challenging the admiration while rebuking the animosities and evoking the fears of partisan leaders on the opposite side of the chamber who dared to asperse the section from which he hailed. Mahone and Kellogg had cowered under his terrible denunciation; Conkling himself had winced under his withering fire; and even the Knight of the Splendid Plume had felt uncomfortable more than once in the battery blaze of the redoubtable Hill. Almost every important issue had been touched and illuminated by his genius; and he had just commenced to prepare an elaborate argument upon the race question at the South when his noble tongue was seized and silenced by the malady which retired him all too soon from the stage of public life and hushed forever the sweetest bugle which had sounded in the halls of Congress since the days of the Immortal Trio.

Back in the old capitol building in Atlanta in 1877 when the General Assembly had met in joint session to elect a Senator, the presiding officer in announcing the result of the ballot had declared Mr. Hill elected for the ensuing term of six years, and Speaker Bacon had added: "Why not say elected for the remainder of his life." What pro

phetic words! They had been uttered in the ardent enthusiasm of the moment; but they had now been literally fulfilled. Not in the fulsome sense, but in the rigid terms of the compliment, Mr. Hill had worn the toga for the balance of his days. But Speaker Bacon, who was himself destined to represent Georgia in the Senate, had as little thought of how his prophecy would be fulfilled as he had of how his own brow would some day wear that wreath of honor.

It was probably at least four years before his death that Mr. Hill, while in Washington, noticed an abrasion on the left side of his tongue, scarcely larger than a pin's head. Since the irritation was only slight he gave it little thought, supposing that a tooth had caused it by producing a bruise which the nicotine from smoking had slightly inflamed. He was not the man to worry over trifles; and though the obstreperous little pimple refused to be quiet he patiently allowed it to nibble upon his nerves for months. But finding eventually that the little disturber had become an obstinate sore, he began to apply mild correctives. It was useless, however. Astringents proved unavailing. He was about to consult Dr. Gross, of Philadelphia, the noted surgeon and specialist, when he was diverted from his purpose by an insistent friend who urged him to consult an eminent physician of New York, Dr. Bayard. Dr. Bayard pronounced the trouble benign ulcer, and immediately began appropriate treatment. But this was most unfortunate. The diagnosis being incorrect the remedy applied failed to reach the seat of the disease; and the disorder, which, in the beginning, could

have been easily eradicated, was given an opportunity to root itself more firmly in the system.

An exciting political campaign had now opened in Georgia in which Mr. Hill was expected to bear some part, but he was obliged to excuse himself on the ground that an ulcerous eruption upon his tongue made it necessary for him to abandon his expected speech-making. This was the first intimation which the public had received of the malady which was destined to end the life of this glorious Georgian; and the fact that his eloquent tongue, which had so often roused the echoes of the State, was the seat of the trouble not only furnished capital for thoughtless criticism but material for mystified and puzzled comment. The tongue of all other tongues in Georgia, which spoke the senatorial language of the silent Webster and even revived the coronal accents of the old Demosthenes, might well have excited the bewilderment of Georgians when it told of the only infirmity it ever bore. Idly as the public may have entertained it at the time, little believing that any serious harm could ever reach the throne of sceptered eloquence from such an unregarded source, it nevertheless remains that the fatal canker underlay the blossoms of his brightest victories in the Senate and put an expiring note in the music of his lustiest syllables.

It was not until July 19, 1881, that Mr. Hill became truthfully aware of the real malignant character of his disease. He had patiently endured the treatment which, as it now clearly appeared, had been grounded upon an incorrect hypothesis; and seeking Dr. Gross, whom he found at Cape May, he was told that the trouble was cancer and that the use of the knife, if effective at all, must