The trip was made in Henderson’s private car; in fact, in a special train, vestibuled; a neat baggage car with library and reading-room in one end, a dining-room car, a private car for invited guests, and his own car—­a luxurious structure, with drawing-room, sleeping-room, bath-room, and office for his telegrapher and type-writer.  The whole was a most commodious house of one story on wheels.  The cost of it would have built and furnished an industrial school and workshop for a hundred negroes; but this train was, I dare say, a much more inspiring example of what they might attain by the higher education.  There were half a dozen in the party besides the Hendersons—­Carmen, of course; Mr. Ponsonby, the English attache; and Mrs. Laflamme, to matronize three New York young ladies.  Margaret and Carmen had never been so far South before.

Is it not agreeable to have sweet charity silver shod?  This sumptuous special train caused as much comment as the errand on which it went.  Its coming was telegraphed from station to station, and crowds everywhere collected to see it.  Brisk reporters boarded it; the newspapers devoted columns to descriptions of it; editorials glorified it as a signal example of the progress of the great republic, or moralized on it as a sign of the luxurious decadence of morals; pointing to Carthage and Rome and Alexandria in withering sarcasm that made those places sink into insignificance as corrupters of the world.  There were covert allusions to Cleopatra ensconced in the silken hangings of the boudoir car, and one reporter went so far as to refer to the luxury of Capua and Baiae, to their disparagement.  All this, however, was felt to add to the glory of the republic, and it all increased the importance of Henderson.  To hear the exclamations, “That’s he!” “That’s him!” “That’s Henderson!” was to Margaret in some degree a realization of her ambition; and Carmen declared that it was for her a sweet thought to be identified with Cleopatra.

So the Catachoobee University had its splendid new building—­as great a contrast to the shanties from which its pupils came as is the Capitol at Washington to the huts of a third of its population.  If the reader is curious he may read in the local newspapers of the time glowing accounts of its “inaugural dedication”; but universities are so common in this country that it has become a little wearisome to read of ceremonies of this sort.  Mr. Henderson made a modest reply to the barefaced eulogy on himself, which the president pronounced in the presence of six hundred young men and women of various colors and invited guests—­a eulogy which no one more thoroughly enjoyed than Carmen.  I am sorry to say that she refused to take the affair seriously.

“I felt for you, Mr. Henderson,”; she said, after the exercises were over.  “I blushed for you.  I almost felt ashamed, after all the president said, that you had given so little.”

“You seem, Miss Eschelle,” remarked Mr. Ponsonby, “to be enthusiastic about the education and elevation of the colored people.”