jelly.  Before the Major rested broiled wild ducks, on which he could show his carving skill—­on game as well as men.  A great turkey supplanted the venison, and last to come, and before Richard Hunt, Lieutenant of the Rifles, was a Kentucky ham.  That ham!  Mellow, aged, boiled in champagne, baked brown, spiced deeply, rosy pink within, and of a flavor and fragrance to shatter the fast of a Pope; and without, a brown-edged white layer, so firm that the lieutenant’s deft carving knife, passing through, gave no hint to the eye that it was delicious fat.  There had been merry jest and laughter and banter and gallant compliment before, but it was Richard Hunt’s turn now, and story after story he told, as the rose-flakes dropped under his knife in such thin slices that their edges coiled.  It was full half an hour before the carver and story-teller were done.  After that ham the tablecloth was lifted, and the dessert spread on another lying beneath; then that, too, was raised, and the nuts and wines were placed on a third—­red damask this time.

Then came the toasts:  to the gracious hostess from Major Buford; to Miss Lucy from General Dean; from valiant Richard Hunt to blushing Margaret, and then the ladies were gone, and the talk was politics—­the election of Lincoln, slavery, disunion.

“If Lincoln is elected, no power but God’s can avert war,” said Richard Hunt, gravely.

Dan’s eyes flashed.  “Will you take me?”

The lieutenant lifted his glass.  “Gladly, my boy.”

“Kentucky’s convictions are with the Union; her kinship and sympathies with the South,” said a deep-voiced lawyer.  “She must remain neutral.”

“Straddling the fence,” said the Major, sarcastically.

“No; to avert the war, if possible, or to act the peacemaker when the tragedy is over.”

“Well, I can see Kentuckians keeping out of a fight,” laughed the General, and he looked around.  Three out of five of the men present had been in the Mexican war.  The General had been wounded at Cerro Gordo, and the Major had brought his dead home in leaden coffins.

“The fanatics of Boston, the hot-heads of South Carolina—­they are making the mischief.”

“And New England began with slavery,” said the lawyer again.

“And naturally, with that conscience that is a national calamity, was the first to give it up,” said Richard Hunt, “when the market price of slaves fell to sixpence a pound in the open Boston markets.”  There was an incredulous murmur.

“Oh, yes,” said Hunt, easily, “I can show you advertisements in Boston papers of slaves for sale at sixpence a pound.”

Perhaps it never occurred to a soul present that the word “slave” was never heard in that region except in some such way.  With Southerners, the negroes were “our servants” or “our people”—­never slaves.  Two lads at that table were growing white—­Chad and Harry—­and Chad’s lips opened first.