thirty minutes the bill was defeated, and the House adjourned.
As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:
"How did you do it?"
Stoneman's huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:
"I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if they would join with me and defeat this bill, I'd give them a better one the next session. And I will—Negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it whole!"
Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.
The great Commoner laughed, as he departed:
"He is yet too good for this world, but he'll forget it before we're done this fight."
On the steps a beggar asked him for a night's lodging, and he tossed him a gold eagle. ······· The North, which had rejected Negro suffrage for itself with scorn, answered Stoneman's fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.
So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the very existence of Stanton's prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten, and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that Andrew
