They expected to have a good antediluvian time of it, as Mr. Clay’s compromise carry-all had transported into the wilderness the bad-looking lot which had broken into the peace of the gentlemanly Fillmore. Mr. Buchanan was sent away to England, and some restless engineers somewhere toward the Pacific,—a pleasant-sounding place far away out West,—to get up a report on a railroad which might amuse the young people to read in the long winter evenings. Suddenly, however, all of these serene prospects were clouded. The great shield, constructed by the Democratic Convention to hang in front of the venerable President, and to prevent agitation, was found, in spite of its solid-looking face, to be pierced on the inside by impertinent little teredos, whose ceaseless boring had already begun to weaken its resisting power. Other mariners wished to sail in between the cotton-covered feet. And in January, 1854, one of these Presidential seamen, from Illinois, named Stephen A. Douglas, leaped ashore on a bluff point just outside the harbor, exclaiming with great lung power that “every Territory had a right to do as it chose about slavery.” This declaration from a Democratic friend startled the elderly party not a little; but when that friend rose to a higher pitch and shouted that the Missouri Compromise line of 1821 which kept slavery from all territory north of 36° 30´, was unconstitutional, and leaping upon the solid old dike, with bill and blow, crashed through it, letting out the bitter waters of strife to flood with its pent-up strength all the wide land, the antediluvian party started to their feet in great alarm. When, however, Mr. Davis whispered to the President that this was only undoing a modern wrong, and restoring ancient rights, that venerable gentleman folded his arms and sat down contented. Looking out upon the freshet, the bewildered Africans seemed to feel that their only refuge was the north pole, now that even the wilds of Kansas and Nebraska furnished only markets for their higher-priced bodies. For a time the “little Douglas” appeared to look as large as the colossus itself. He seemed to be as powerful in American politics as the family of his Scottish namesake, which after intermarrying eleven times with the royal stocks of England and Scotland, became so resistless as to start the proverb, “No man may touch a Douglas, nor a Douglas man, for if he do he is sure to come by the waur” (worse).