Save once, as at his wooden stump
      The young man looked awhile,
    And damned the man who made that war—­
      He saw Nick Hammer smile. 
    “My little boy,” the old man said,
      “Think long as I have thunk—­
    You’ll find this war rests on the head
      Of that ’air Mister Funk!”

JUDGE WHALEY’S DEMON.

In the little town of Chester, near the Bay of Chesapeake, lived an elegant man, with the softest manners in the world and a shadow forever on his countenance.  He bore a blameless character and an honored name.  He had one son of the same name as his own, Perry Whaley.  This son was forever with him, for use or for pleasure; they could not be happy separated, nor congenial together.  A destiny seemed to unite them, but with it also a baleful memory.  The negroes whispered that in the boy’s conception and birth was a secret of shame; he was not this father’s son, and his mother had confessed it.

That mother was gone—­fled to a distant part of the world with her betrayer—­and the divorce was recorded while yet young Perry Whaley was a babe.  But the boy never knew it:  his origin reposed in the sensitive memory of his father only, and every day the father looked at the son long and distantly, and the son at the father with a most affectionate longing.

“Papa,” he would say, “can’t you try to love me?  Do I disobey you?  I am sure I am always unhappy out of your sight.”

The father could not do without that boy, but could only hate him.  “My son,” he would reply, “you are obedient, but a demon!  I could not love you if I would!”

“Never mind then, father, I can wait.  There is plenty of time in life to make you love me!”

Judge Whaley—­for he had been on the bench—­was the highest example in Maryland of honor and pride.  A General of militia, often in the Legislature, and once or twice a Senator at Washington, he had all the shattered sensibilities of a proud man wounded in the soul.  Age was coming untimely upon his high temples and shadowed countenance, and as he walked along the market-place and green court-house yard, polite to men, boys, and negroes, they said in low tones, “Pity such a real gentleman can’t be happy!”

In public affairs Judge Whaley was not silent:  he led his party with intrepid utterances, and his prejudices, like his intellect, were strong; but though the election sometimes hung by a few votes, and his influence then gave every temptation on the part of low speakers and writers to allude to his domestic dishonor, the vile reminiscence was never mentioned.  A profound respect for the man permeated society, and in his unsmiling way he was kind to whites and blacks.  A slaveholder, and at the head of the principal slave-holding connection, and the particular champion in that region of slavery privileges, he would take his Bible and visit the cottages of his negroes and read to them even when sick of contagious fevers.  He defended