He stood for a moment on the steps of the hotel, drawing on his gloves. Despite the snow, there was a faint suggestion of spring in the air. A thaw had set in. He heard drops slowly pattering down from the cornice above. The blue-white splendors of the electric light, with its myriad fine and filar rays whorled out into the darkness, showed a deserted street. A carriage, looking with its two lamps like some watchful-eyed monster, pulled up in front of the door, and the colored driver, with a wide display of a toothful grin, alighted with a “Want a hack, boss?” “Jim, Tom—oh, it’s Dick,” said Kinsard, glancing at the dusky face in the lamplight; he knew all the colored folks in town. “Well, drive me to the Capitol, and don’t be all night about it, either.” He flung himself upon the seat, lifted his long, slender feet to the opposite cushions, and with a complete collapse of anatomy resigned himself to the transit. The vehicle moved from the curb with something of the sound of a boat pushing off from shore, so splashing was its progress through the deep slush of the streets. The hoof-beats of the horses were muffled; the voice of the driver sounded, and was still again. Kinsard smoked in idle abstraction, hardly thinking, perhaps, even of his mission and the slaughter of the “innocent William,” as he slangily called the bill which he intended to kill. When the carriage had climbed the Capitol hill, on which the fair edifice towered, glimmering vaguely white against the purple night, its rows of illuminated windows all gleaming yellow, and casting dim shafts of light adown the snowy slopes of the grounds below, he roused himself and looked out. Even after he had alighted and ascended the long flights of stone steps, between the groups of great figures that stand beneath the flaring gas lamps, he turned, and more than once walked the length of the stately portico, gazing down with a vague attraction which he could hardly have explained at the snowy roofs of the city, on its many hills, amidst the dun-colored intervals of the streets and the misty depressions. The heavens were purple above it; the stars palpitated in the infinite distances; a late moon was rising. He recognized the outline of Fort Negley to the south against the sky; he saw the steely gleam of the river. Spires, long glancing lines of light, domes, turrets, mansard roofs, mingled in picturesque fantasies of architecture. A bell rang out a mellow note; the icy air had crystalline vibrations. Here and there the aureola of an unseen electric light, the mere fringes of lustre, seemed the rising of some more cheerful orb; for melancholy hung upon the progress of the moon. In the tower of a public building Time lifted a smiling face in an illuminated dial, and far away to the west he saw a planet touch a spire, in an unprophesied conjunction. The lights of homes, yellow, steady, gleaming in some fantasy of form, seemed themselves a constellation of