"School, father!" said Terrence, with an impatient shrug of his shoulders. "Faith, don't talk to me of schools and colleges, when it's a war we are goin' to have, sure. My next school will be breakin' heads." "Be the times, you'll have yer own cracked!" "Not before I've got even with some of the divilish Britons, methinks." "What be ye goin' to see the prisident about?" This interview, the reader will bear in mind, was before war had been declared. "I am going to tell Prisident Madison to give Johnny Bull a good whippin'." "Prisident Madison will tell yez to moind yer own business," the Hibernian answered. "We'll see about that!" Terrence was determined on making the journey, and he set out next day by the mail coach for Washington City. Public houses in Washington were not numerous then, yet there were a few good hotels, and he put up at the old Continental House. Terrence, with all his reckless impetuosity, proceeded carefully to his point. Where boldness won success, he was bold; where caution and prudence were essential to win, he was cautious and prudent. He noticed a door opening into a room from the main corridor, over which was tacked a strip of white canvas bearing in large black letters the words: "HEADQUARTERS OF THE PEACE PARTY." Men were coming and going from this apartment with grave and serious faces and corrugated brows, as if they had the weight of all the world on their shoulders. Terrence watched the comers and goers awhile and then halted a colored chambermaid, and, in an awe-inspiring whisper, asked who was sick in the room "ferninst." He was told no one. He thought some one must be dangerously ill, people went in and out so softly and talked in such low tones; but she assured him it was the room where the "peace party" met to discuss means to prevent President Madison and congress from declaring or prosecuting war against Great Britain. That those men were congressmen or merchants from Boston and other New England towns, who opposed war.