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The Crisis

By WINSTON CHURCHILL Condensation by WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT THE scene is laid chiefly in St. Louis between 1857 and 1865. Stephen Brice, of the Brahmin class of Boston, after his father's business failure and death, came with his mother to St. Louis, there to study and practise law in the office of his father's friend, Judge Silas Whipple.

Virginia Carvel, the only child of Col. Comyn Carvel, was beautiful and distinguished. The colonel was of an old Maryland family. He was the leading dry-goods merchant of St. Louis and a veteran of the Mexican War. Judge Whipple was taciturn and abrupt. He concealed a generous heart under a forbidding exterior. He slept in his office. He was a "black" Republican. He secured clients because they needed his professional ability. He took Sunday dinner at Colonel Carvel's, where the discussion over slavery in Virginia's hearing went on with a plainness of speech that only the lifelong friendship of the two men could have made possible. Colonel Carvel was the highest type of a Southern gentleman.