Already, however, the apple of discord, or rather a whole barrelful of very red-faced Spitzenbergs, mixed with meal-colored russets, had been emptied into the Union, and rolled over the floor of Congress. The acquisitions, gained from Mexico by arms and the treaty of 1848, including the new gold weights handed up by California, disturbed the adjustments of Mr. Calhoun’s patent balances, which only worked well when a colored State was put on one side at the same moment that an uncolored one was put upon the other,—an operation about as difficult and just as natural, as that which regulates the number of children in a family to the number of bushels of wheat grown in any season, or to the number of windy days in the year. In 1850, three Territories pressed for admission as States, each carrying some of the fatal apples; California, with a Constitution excluding slavery; New Mexico, formed out of Texas, but disputing with her a boundary line; and Utah, then called Deseret, taking in all the women which could be drawn thither, and, by the aid of its dry air, absorbing them into the Smith and Young families. Texas herself, admitted into the Union in December, 1847, always swaggering with a rapier in her belt and a patch over her eye, bullied New Mexico lustily on one side, so as to make lustier claims upon the United States on the other,—a cock-eyed way of shooting that made one barrel with two diverging eyes over the sight do the work of a double-shooter. Petitions from the North for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and from the South for a more stringent fugitive-slave act, rolled very large Spitzenbergs and russets on the floor of Congress. Looking from the legislative galleries upon the newly arrived heap, a Western stroller might have asked of his comrade, as the freshly landed Irishman demanded of his countrymen, at his first sight of a tortoise walking about, “Be these live snuff-boxes common in these America; be they or _be_ they?” and might have received a like answer, “Be asy, and look on I tell ye, for I dunno’s they be, and I dunno _as_ they be.” Suddenly, however, Mr. Clay’s old established omnibus, belonging to the compromise line,—which generally took up all the passengers, rejoicing at their good luck, although apt to set them down very discontented at the end of the way,—drove in to carry off in one load all of these fretting, complaining subjects. Just at this time, July 9, 1850, the large-hearted but short-headed President died, and the polite and urbane Fillmore, “Washing his hands with invisible soap, In imperceptible water,”