He did not light his cigar, however, when the other left him; took off his hat to let the wind blow through his hair, the petulant heat dying out of his face, giving place to a rigid settling, at last, of the fickle features. A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out of the cell where his victims were. "Gorging himself, while they and the country suffer the loss," he muttered. But Paul was a hot-brained young man. We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in politics, such as the people make pets of. "Such men as Schuyler Gurney get the fattest offices. God send us a monarchy soon!" he hissed under his breath, as the gate closed after the politician. By which you will perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too near-sighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very poetic, Millennium-like idea for stump-speeches and college-cubs, but he grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome discipline. The Doctor was born in one of the Border States; men there, it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics; their daily bread of rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for anything. In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a sensuous languor. To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clean, pure, unperfumed, the stars distant and lonely, his limbs bedded in the clinging moss, he was rested for the moment, happy like a child, with no subtile-sensed questionings why. The sounds of the village could not penetrate there; the content, the listless hush of the night was with him; the delicious shimmer of the trees in the starlight, the low call of the pigeon to its mate, even the fall of the catalpa-blossoms upon his hand, thrilled him with unreasoning pleasure: a dull consciousness that the earth was alive and well, and he was glad to live with the rest.