In illustration of this I wish briefly to call attention to one of the many converts to Unionism. Just before the war there was a slave auction on the steps of the Court-house. An artist, Mr. Thomas S. Noble, made sketches of the impressive and shameful scene. He was a Southerner, but from a child had been opposed to the system of slavery. He then and there determined from the sketches which he had made to depict on canvas that sale of men and women under the hammer of the auctioneer. But he was too busy with other work to put his hand at once to this projected task. And while it was deferred the war broke out. Out of sympathy for the people of the South he enlisted as a soldier in the Confederate army. When the term of his enlistment expired, he returned to St. Louis, and took up again the work of his studio. On account of his absence his patrons to a considerable extent had fallen away from him. He found that he had leisure time on his hands, and so determined to begin the work of painting the slave auction, projected so long before. In his mind this public sale of men and women was a typical national crime. It was sanctioned by both State and national law. The steps of the Court-house in which both were interpreted and enforced became without protest a slave mart. The Stars and Stripes floating over the heads of the auctioneer and cowering slaves exposed to the gaze of the curious throng made the sale a national offence. Under a sense of this flagrant national injustice he began to paint and the product was a mighty protest against the crime of legalized bondage. With his sword he had just been fighting for slavery and the Southern Confederacy; now with his brush, he was contending against both. And his brush was mightier than his sword. But he was soon put to the severest test. What he had painted with exhilaration and joy brought upon him the sharpest of trials. In a social way some highly esteemed Southern friends dropped into his studio. For the first time they looked on his slave auction, or “Slave Mart” as he called it. Knowing nothing of his real attitude towards slavery, they nevertheless at once felt the powerful protest which that new painting uttered against slavery and its accompanying evils. In the front window of a picture store on Fourth Street the artists of the city were accustomed to display their paintings. The Southern friends of Mr. Noble, as in his studio they gazed upon his embodied protest against slave auctions, anxiously asked: “Are you going to exhibit that painting in the window on Fourth Street?” He replied that he had thought of doing so. They said, “If you do, you shall have no social standing with us. Our relations with you will end forever.”