“Pah! Does your dead wife need your care any more than my live wife needs mine? ’T is your infernal treason keeps me here. Can you count the broken hearts and ruined constitutions you have already made,—the thousands you have sent to untimely graves,—in this attempt to carry out your beastly nigger-breeding, slavery-spreading speculation? And now you presume to whine because I’ll not let you slip back to hatch more treason, under the pretence that you want to go to a funeral! As if you hadn’t made funerals enough already in the land! Curse your impudence, sir! Be thankful I don’t string you up to the yard-arm. Here, Mr. Buttons, see that this fellow is placed among the prisoners and strictly guarded. I hold you responsible for him, sir!” The Commodore turned on his heel and left Ratcliff panting with an intolerable fury that he dared not vent. Big drops of perspiration came out on his face. The Midshipman, playfully addressed as Mr. Buttons, was a very stern-looking gentleman, of the name of Adams, who wore on his coat a very conspicuous row of buttons, and whose fourteenth birthday had been celebrated one week before. Motioning to Ratcliff, and frowning imperiously, he stamped his foot and exclaimed, “Follow me!” The slave-lord, with an internal half-smothered groan of rage and despair, saw that there was no help, and obeyed. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE OCCUPANT OF THE WHITE HOUSE. “They forbore to break the chain Which bound the dusky tribe, Checked by the owner’s fierce disdain, Lured by ‘Union’ as the bribe. Destiny sat by and said, ‘Pang for pang your seed shall pay; Hide in false peace your coward head,— I bring round the harvest-day.’” _R. W. Emerson._ In one of the smaller parlors of the White House in Washington sat two men of rather marked appearance. One of them sat leaning back in his tipped chair, with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and his right ancle resting on his left knee. His figure, though now flaccid and relaxed, would evidently be a tall one if pulled out like the sliding joints of a spy-glass; but gaunt, lean, and ungainly, with harsh angles and stooping shoulders. He was dressed in a suit of black, with a black satin vest, and round his neck a black silk kerchief tied carelessly in a knot, and passing under a shirt-collar turned down and revealing a neck brawny, sinewy, and tanned.