"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only _dared_! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the opportunity. Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody _out_! And before many days some of you will sing a different tune--take my word for it. Some of you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the while." "What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to other ears. "I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take Philadelphia; then--" "Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!" "He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?" "Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two years--better troops than his own, and more of them." "Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about the change of tune!" "Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the trouble!" said the old man. "The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the physician. "The army has no confidence in _him_, and the country has no confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!--" and the face of the doctor lit up with a new expression. A sneer settled itself upon his well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in what he was about to say, now! "Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant. "That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the regiments, was he not?"