"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.
"It is true, and you know it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman! I don't! If the country is to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not happen to think and act precisely as they do,—why, the sooner that Jeff Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."
"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors, and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.
"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only dared! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the opportunity. Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody out! And before many days some of you will sing a different tune—take my word for it. Some of you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the while."
"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to other ears.
"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take Philadelphia; then—"
"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"
"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"
"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two years—better troops than his own, and more of them."
"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about the change of tune!"