Mr. Coffin's study room was upon the northeast, where, with plenty of light and the morning sun, he could sit at his desk looking out upon Harvard Street, and over towards Beacon Street; the opposite side of the street, fortunately, not being occupied by buildings to obscure his view. At first he was often allured from his work for many minutes, and even for a half hour at a time, by a majestic elm-tree so rich in foliage and comely in form that he looked upon it with ravished eyes. It was in this room that he wrote the chapters for his second book, which was to show especially the part which American women had played in the making of their country. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HOME AT ALWINGTON. It was a remarkable coincidence that Mr. Coffin was to exchange worlds and transfer his work in the very year in which the issues of the Civil War were to be eliminated from national politics, when not one of the several party platforms was to make any allusion to the struggle of 1861-65, or to any of its numerous legacies. In this year, 1896, also, for the first time since 1860, Southern men, the one a Confederate general, and the other a Populist editor, were to be nominated for possible chief magistracy. Mr. Coffin, with prescience, had already seen that the war issues, grand as they were, had melted away into even vaster national questions. He had turned his thoughts towards the solution of problems which concerned the nation as a whole and humanity as a race. His historical addresses and lectures went back to older subjects, while his thoughts soared forward to the newer conditions, theories, and problems which were looming in the slowly unveiling future. In literature he turned, and gladly, too, from the scenes of slavery and war between brothers. With his pen he sought to picture the ancient heroisms, in the story of which the people of the States of rice and cotton, as well as of granite, ice, and grain, were alike interested, as in a common heritage. In Alwington, surrounded by old and new friends, genial and cultured, he hoped, if it were God's will, to complete his work with a rotunda-like series of pen pictures of the Revolution. This was not to be, though he was to die "in harness," like Nicanor of old, without lingering illness or broken powers. While he was to see not a few golden days of A. D. 1896, yet the proposed pictures were to be left upon the easel, scarcely more than begun. The pen and ink on his table were to remain, like brushes on the palette, with none to finish as the master-workman had planned.