"I took lodgings at a private boardinghouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, where there was a poverty-stricken Virginian, of the old Whig school, after an office. He did 'not think his State would secede.' I saw much of the Republican members of Congress, who said if I wanted a position they would do what they could for me. Senator Sumner suggested that I would make a good secretary of one of the Western territories. "I called upon my old schoolmate Sargeant who had been for many years in the Treasury. Having constructed the telegraph fire-alarm, and done something in engineering, I thought I was competent to become an examiner in the patent office. I made out an application, which was signed by the entire Massachusetts delegation, recommending me. I dropped it into the post-office, and that was the last I saw or even thought of it, for the great crisis in the history of the country was so rapidly approaching, and so evident, that,--newspaper man as I was,--accustomed to forecast coming events, I could see what many others could not see. "I was walking with Senator Wilson up E Street, on a bright moonlight night. The moon's rays, falling upon the unfinished dome of the Capitol, brought the building out in bold relief." "'Will it ever be finished?' I asked. The senator stopped, and gazed upon it a moment in silence. "'We are going to have a war, but the people of this country will not give up the Union, I think. Yet, to-day, that building, prospectively, is a pile of worthless marble.'" [Illustration: Yours truly Charles Carleton Coffin] CHAPTER VII. THE WAR CORRESPONDENT. When the long gathering clouds broke in the storm at Sumter, and war was precipitated in a rain of blood, Charles Carleton Coffin's first question was as to his duty. He was thirty-seven years old, healthy and hearty, though not what men would usually call robust. To him who had long learned to look into the causes of things, who knew well his country's history, and who had been educated to thinking and feeling by the long debate on slavery, the Secession movement was nothing more or less than a slaveholders' conspiracy. His conviction in 1861 was the same as that held by him, when more than thirty years of reflection had passed by, that the inaugurators of the Civil War of 1861-65 were guilty of a gigantic crime.