With a graceful bow he hurried home to complete the final preparations for his departure. He walked with quick, strong step. And yet as he approached the door of the little house in the humbler quarter of the city his gait unconsciously slowed down.
He dreaded this last struggle with his mother. But it must come. He entered the modestly furnished sitting room and looked at her calm, sweet face with a sudden sinking. She would be absolutely alone in the world. And yet no harm could befall her. She was the friend of every human being who knew her. It was the agony of this parting he dreaded and the loneliness that would torture her in his absence.
He spoke with forced cheerfulness.
"Well, mater, it's all settled. I leave at ten-twenty to-morrow morning."
She rose and placed her hands on his shoulders. The tears blinded her.
"How little I thought when I taught your boyish lips to speak the musical tongue of Italy I was preparing this bitter hour for my soul! I begged your father to resign his consulship at Genoa and brought you home to teach you the great lesson—to love your country and reverence your country's God. And since your father's death the dream of my heart has been to see you a minister, teaching and uplifting the people into a higher and nobler life—"
"That is my aim, mater dear. I am consecrating body, mind and soul to the task now of saving the Union, an inheritance priceless and glorious to millions yet unborn. I'm going to break the chains that bind slaves. I'm going to break the brutal and cruel power of the Southern Tyranny that has been strangling the nation for forty years!"
His eyes flashed with the fire of fanatical enthusiasm.
He slipped his arm about his mother's slender waist, drew her to the window and pointed to the unfinished dome of the white, majestic capitol.
"See, mater dear, the sun is bursting through the clouds now and lighting with splendor the marble columns. Last night when the speeches were done and the crowds gone I stood an hour and studied the flawless symmetry of those magnificent wings and over it all the great solemn dome with its myriad gleaming eyes far up in the sky—and I wondered if God meant nothing big or significant to humanity when he breathed the dream of that poem in marble into the souls of our people! I can't believe it, dear. I stood and prayed while I dreamed. I saw in the ragged scaffolding and the big ugly crane swinging from its place in the sky the symbol of our crude beginnings—our ragged past. And then the snow-white vision of the finished building, the most majestic monument ever reared on earth to Freedom and her cause—and I saw the glory of a new Democracy rising from the blood and agony of the past to be the hope and inspiration of the world!