And yet, when the days drew on themselves the coolness of October, and one should have looked for him to mend, the General fell suddenly away to the last flicker of his strength like a candle burning out. It was then the doctor gave him that warning how his time was near, and put us upon our guard to meet the worst. I may tell you my heart was as so much wood under my ribs, and gloom dwelt in the house like a ghost. It will have somewhat a foolish sound, but, as I live by bread I think it was our Peg to save the General out from between the paws of death. Not by her care, though that was above description, but rather with a thought she one day laid upon him. “Child, I shall surely die,” the General was saying. “I have thought so more than once during my rough life; but this time is my first to really know. Now I see that I shall die.” Then he asked her to read a song from the hymn-book of his wife. “They are always an ease to me,” he said. Peg's eyes were running tears, and she had her work cut out to smother her sobs. For all that, she bore bravely up. “You will not die,” cried Peg. “And I shall read you, instead of hymns, how the Vice-President means to pull the country to pieces with his Charleston plots. Will you die and make him president in your stead--endow him with the power for his treasons?” Peg told me how she had no design in saying this, and that Calhoun was in her mouth no more than an exclamation. And yet had it been the prescription of a whole college of doctors, it could not have exerted a wholesomer effect. The General had told me he would die; and I had stood in daily terror of it; and yet neither had once fallen to consider--and this smacks of the foolish for both of us--how his death would raise up Calhoun to take his place. The truth is, I could never bring myself to plan or look beyond the General's death; my thought, however fear-spurred, would run no farther than just his death; there it would stop nor budge a pace beyond. The General's death would seem the end of things, as it might be a second deluge. And perhaps he, himself, fell into similar frame; only with him it was but his building on that all-swallowing hope of meeting with his Saint Rachel, never again to be parted. That crowded out all else. Letting conjecturings go adrift, however, the bald fact remains that it was Peg, after all, who came first to make us take a thought in advance and consider where the General's going would place the country with Calhoun. I remember how the General lay back on his pillow after Peg's outburst of warning; and next how his glance began to collect its old-time fire. “By the Eternal!”--this in a whisper--“I will not die and leave the people helpless with those traitors. I must either live my term out, or live till I hang Calhoun. The country must be safe before I go.”