“Horace, you frighten me,” said Rose, who had come in while they were talking.

The color faded from Elsie’s cheek, and a shudder ran over her, as she turned eagerly to hear her husband reply.

“Why cross the bridge before we come to it, Dinsmore?” he answered cheerily, meeting his wife’s anxious look with one so fond and free from care, that her heart grew light; “surely there’ll be no fighting where there is no yoke of oppression to cast off.  There can be no effect without a cause.”

“The accursed lust of power on the part of a few selfish, unprincipled men, may invent a cause, and for the carrying out of their own ambitious schemes, they may lead the people to believe and act upon it.  No one proposes to interfere with our institution where it already exists—­even the Republican party has emphatically denied any such intention—­yet the hue and cry has been raised that slavery will be abolished by the incoming administration, arms put into the hands of the blacks, and a servile insurrection will bring untold horrors to the hearths and homes of the South.”

“Oh, dreadful, dreadful!” cried Rose.

“But, my dear, there is really no such danger:  the men (unscrupulous politicians) do not believe it themselves; but they want power, and as they could never succeed in getting the masses to rebel to compass their selfish ends, they have invented this falsehood and are deceiving the people with it.”

“Don’t put all the blame on the one side, Dinsmore,” said Mr. Travilla.

“No; that would be very unfair.  The framers of our constitution looked to gradual emancipation to rid us of this blot on our escutcheon, this palpable inconsistency between our conduct and our political creed.

“It did so in a number of States, and probably would ere this in all, but for the fierce attacks of a few ultra-abolitionists, who were more zealous to pull the mote out of their brother’s eye than the beam out of their own, and so exasperated the Southern people by their wholesale abuse and denunciations, that all thought of emancipation was given up.

“It is human nature to cling the tighter to anything another attempts to force from you; even though you may have felt ready enough to give it up of your own free will.”

“Very true,” said Travilla, “and Garrison and his crew would have been at better work repenting of their own sins, than denouncing those of their neighbors.”

“But, papa, you don’t think it can come to war, a civil war, in our dear country? the best land the sun shines on; and where there is none of the oppression that makes a wise man mad!”

“I fear it, daughter, I greatly fear it; but we will cast this care, as well as all others, upon Him who ’doeth according to His will, in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.’”

What a winter of uncertainty and gloom to Americans, both at home and abroad, was that of 1860-’61.  Each mail brought to our anxious friends in Naples news calculated to depress them more and more in view of the calamities that seemed to await their loved land.