A remarkable feature of this episode was the discovery of how many slaveholders there were who were not white people. Now and then in the past, when for some special reason a negro had been freed, he would save his earnings till he had accumulated enough to buy his wife and children, who still remained in bondage to him till he saw fit to manumit them. One case which attracted wide attention was that of a woman who had bought her husband, a graceless scamp who proceeded to celebrate his good fortune by becoming an incorrigible drunkard. This had so outraged the feelings of his wife that she had finally sold him to a dealer who was picking up a boatload of cheap slaves to carry south. From that hour she had lost sight of him; but she haunted the commissioners’ sessions from day to day in the hope that the Government, now that it was going into the slave-buying business, might give her a little addition to the bargain price at which she had sold the old man. Judiciary Square, in which the Court House and the Pension Office stand, was, when Chief Justice Taney lived in Indiana Avenue, a neighborhood of consequence. Several of the older buildings thereabout exhale a flavor of fifty or sixty years ago, and tradition connects them with such personages as Rufus Choate, Caleb Cushing, Thomas H. Benton, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Fremont, and John A. Dix. Opposite the east park of the Capitol, as we have already seen, stands the Old Capitol, a building with a variegated history. It was erected for the accommodation of Congress after the burning of the Capitol by the British. In it Henry Clay passed some years of his Speakership, and till very lately there was a scar on the wall of one of the rooms which was said to have been made by his desk. Under its roof the first Senators from Indiana, Illinois, and Mississippi took their seats. In front of it, President Monroe was inaugurated. After Congress left it to return to the restored Capitol, it was rented for a boarding-house, patronized chiefly by Senators and Representatives. Here John C. Calhoun lived for some time, and here he died. In one of the rooms, Persico, the Italian sculptor, worked out the model of his “Discoverer.” In another, Ann Royall edited her _Huntress_.