He had smoothed my hair and told me not to cry; God would bless me for being a good child. He was a member of the session when I joined church; his voice in prayer had soothed mother's hard journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city, had ordered its illumination in honor of the battle of Buena Vista, and this, too, on Saturday evening, when the unholy glorification extended into the Sabbath. Measured by the standards of his profession as an elder in the church, whose highest judicatory had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible; no one was more valuable than he, and of none was I so unsparing, yet as I wrote, the letter was blistered with tears; but his oft repeated comment was: "Jane is right," and he went out of his way to take my hand and say, "You were right." Samuel Black, a son of my pastor, dropped his place as leader of the Pittsburg bar and rushed to the war. My comments were thought severe, even for me, yet the first intimation I had that I had not been cast aside as a monster, came from his sister, who sent me a message that her father, her husband and herself, approved my criticism. Samuel returned with a colonel's commission, and one day I was about to pass him without recognition, where he stood on the pavement talking to two other lawyers, when he stepped before me and held out his hand. I drew back, and he said: "Is it possible you will not take my hand?" I looked at it, then into his manly, handsome face, and answered: "There is blood on it; the blood of women and children slain at their own altars, on their own hearthstones, that you might spread the glorious American institution of woman-whipping and baby-stealing." "Oh," he exclaimed, "This is too bad! I swear to you I never killed a woman or a child." "Then you did not fight in Mexico, did not help to bombard Buena Vista." His friends joined him, and insisted that I did the Colonel great wrong, when he looked squarely into my face and, holding out his hand, said: "For sake of the old church, for sake of the old man, for sake of the old times, give me your hand." I laid it in his, and hurried away, unable to speak, for he was the most eloquent man in Pennsylvania. He fell at last at the head of his regiment, while fighting in the battle of Fair Oaks, for that freedom he had betrayed in Mexico. When Kossuth was on his starring tour in this country, he used to create wild enthusiasm by "Your own late glorious struggle with Mexico;" but when he reached that climax in his Pittsburg speech a dead silence fell upon the vast, cheering audience. The social ostracism I had expected when I stepped into the political arena, proved to be Bunyan lions. Instead of shame there came such a crop of glory that I thought of pulling down my barns and building greater, that I might have where to store my new goods. Among the press notices copied by the _Journal_ was this: