A Prairie-Schooner Princess

by Mary K. Maule

It turned out to be a great day for them. They started out immediately after breakfast, and firecrackers, torpedoes, flags, and rockets were purchased at the first store they came to, and in the intervals of other excitement the boys revelled in pops and bangs and explosions, while the girls exploded their torpedoes on the sidewalks, and they all marched gaily to the music of many bands.

There was a great parade in the forenoon, in which the Whigs and Democrats vied with each other in the exhibition of floats, bands, and flower-decked carriages. Long columns of men of both parties marched and shouted, bearing transparencies extolling the virtues of their particular candidates. The Buchanan men wore white coats and caps, and carried huge portraits of their candidate.

There was to be a great political rally at the park in the afternoon, and after dinner the boys and their father followed the crowd to the pretty shaded inclosure, where a great pavilion had been erected, gorgeously decorated with flags and bunting.

The place was already crowded when they arrived, but they pushed their way through the throng and succeeded in getting seats on a long bench before the speakers' stand.

It seemed a little thing that they should be so placed that Joe should be able to look directly into the speaker's face and hear his every word, but upon such trifling things the whole course of a life sometimes depends.

Bands played, a great chorus upon the platform stood up and sang "America," and then a stir and flutter passed through the crowd as a party of gentlemen in frock coats with tall "chimney-pot" hats, made their way to the platform, where they were greeted with great bursts of applause.

The Peniman boys had never heard a public speech in their lives. Partly owing to the fact that their father was a Quaker and avoided discussion of the question that was beginning to seethe and burn through the length and breadth of the land, partly because of the remote and quiet farm from which they had come, they had heard little of the agitation of the times.

Politics were at a white heat throughout the country. The pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties were each using every artifice in their power to elect their candidates. Arguments, discussions, public speeches and inflammatory meetings were taking place in every part of the United States, and the fire that later burst into so fierce a conflagration was beginning to smoulder hotly beneath the surface.

There was something in the very air of that meeting that breathed tension, excitement. And Joshua Peniman felt a cold chill smite his heart, as sitting with his young sons he listened to the conversation that went on about him. Joe, too, felt the electric atmosphere. His eyes brightened and his color rose. When a dapper little gentleman with a massive head and a keen, ruddy face mounted the platform and began to speak he leaned forward eagerly.

He liked the speech. The cultured voice, the smooth periods, the forceful gestures of the man fascinated him. Yet he found his mind continually protesting against the statements he made. The boy knew nothing of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Wilmot Proviso, or the Missouri Compromise, but as the speaker proceeded he found himself arguing passionately against him in his own mind. When the speaker sat down, amid terrific applause, Joe turned to his father.