If it is true that a majority of the Southern people believed that a State had the right to withdraw from the Union when things were not managed in a satisfactory way, it is equally true that there was a party in the North who held the same opinion. They said, "Let the erring sisters go" if they want to, and declared that "Whenever any considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in." These were the rabid Abolitionists, who were perfectly willing that the nation should be destroyed rather than that it should continue to exist half-slave and half-free. One of their leaders, who afterward became a Union general, declared, "If slavery is the condition of the perpetuity of the Union, let the Union _slide,_" for slavery must in no case be allowed to continue. The Southern planters wanted that their "peculiar institution" should be taken into the territories, while the Abolitionists demanded that it should be blotted out altogether; and to these two parties we are indebted for our four years' war. There was still another secession party on both sides of the line, who thought the government had no power to keep the Southern States in the Union if they did not want to stay, and that if allowed to go in peace they would soon get tired of trying to manage their own affairs, and drift back into the Union of their own free will. It was better that the Union should be peacefully sundered than that there should be a war about it. But another party said that such talk was treason; that the Constitution was ordained to establish a "more perfect Union," which was to be "perpetuated"; that no State, or combination of States, had any right to try to break up the government because they could no longer run things to suit themselves; and that there was not room enough for another flag on this Continent. This was the good old Union party, and fortunately it was resolute enough and strong enough to run the starry banner up to the masthead and keep it there. This was what Marcy Gray, a North Carolina boy, had done on this particular morning on the roof of the Barrington Military Institute, and he had done it, too, in spite of all the efforts his cousin, Rodney Gray, backed by nearly all the young rebels in the school, had made to prevent it. Ever since the day on which the news came that South Carolina had passed the ordinance of secession, that flag, which up to this time had been raised and lowered only at certain hours, had been a bone of contention. For long years it had floated over the academy, and no one had ever had a word to say against it; but the moment it became known that one of the Southern States had decided that she would not stay in the Union if Mr. Lincoln was to rule over it, there was a great change in the feelings of the students regarding that piece of bunting. What an excitement there was on the morning of the 21st of December, when Rodney Gray rushed into the