CHAPTER III.

I ACQUIRE A STAKE IN THE COUNTRY.

On going into breakfast the ladies met us with a highly interesting piece
of intelligence which they had found in the morning's news. It was, in
fact, nothing less than an announcement of action taken by the United
States Congress in relation to myself. A resolution had, it appeared,
been unanimously passed which, after reciting the facts of my
extraordinary return to life, proceeded to clear up any conceivable
question that might arise as to my legal status by declaring me an
American citizen in full standing and entitled to all a citizen's rights
and immunities, but at the same time a guest of the nation, and as such
free of the duties and services incumbent upon citizens in general except
as I might choose to assume them.

Secluded as I had been hitherto in the Leete household, this was almost
the first intimation I had the public in my case. That interest, I was
now informed, had passed beyond my personality and was already producing
a general revival of the study of nineteenth-century literature and
politics, and especially of the history and philosophy of the transition
period, when the old order passed into the new.

"The fact is," said the doctor, "the nation has only discharged a debt of
gratitude in making you its guest, for you have already done more for our
educational interests by promoting historical study than a regiment of