Gazing down at her, with his Catholic breviary in his lap, Hugh Fenwick looked in more than image-worship.

The spotted pointer, Albion, took in the scene with one eye, as consonantly mischievous with his own general intentions.

"My gracious!" cried Katy, as the door opened and the dog snapped; "is it you, Nelly? Why, I dreamed you had pecome an

actor at te teatre."

Jake Bosler, too, had been aroused, and his shaggy hair and beard were seen at the stairway-door, and he remarked : "Soun-up. Bi'm-by!"

CHAPTER XXX.

JOHN BROWN EXECUTED.

A WARM Friday within the brink of December-like the climate of the better world let down to temper an old man's winter-saw the lean, long body of John Brown turning, with the breezes from the Shenandoah, at the end of a cord.

There hung the unprefaced one, amid two thousand soldiers, the captain of the greatest episode in time.

The gallows-tree was framed about with lines of chivalry; but something odd, and moral, and pitiful, hung there on a hempen string, which made the imposing military display seem moderate, and no volunteer in it felt the occasion not to be dignified.

Nearest the gallows was the company in which stood to his musket John Wilkes Booth-stern, handsome, and classical. Quantrell was a substitute in a more distant command; John Yates Beall was also in the gay-vestured field—each of these young men taking a lot in the old man's bloody raiment, here raffled in the chief gateway to the slave States.

It was the dress rehearsal of the mightiest war since the courts of Europe had repressed and imbibed republicanism.

Stuart and Lee, Wise and Vallandigham, had rehearsed at the old man's capture. Stonewall Jackson at the head of his school of cadets, Turner Ashby commanding the pickets, Israel Green, the marine-officer who had cut John Brown down, and Jeff Thompson from far-off Missouri, were some of the pawns at the scaffold.

The gray uniforms from Richmond, the light blue from Alexandria, the buff and yellow from Winchester, and the crimson from Appomattox, stood in the great hollow square of troops, to which the militia from Petersburg had guarded this one old man from jail, as he rode upon his coffin. The guidon-flags to designate the positions these and others were to take, prophesied the name, also, on each, of some unborn battle.

No gambler ever paid the odds of life which these neighborhoods paid John Brown—a thousand, at least, to one. No Valkyria of Odin and the Northern gods ever marked more surely the sites of devastation Gettysburg, Chambersburg, Hagerstown, Winchester, Richmond, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, had all been spied out for the strategy that John Brown appeared at this moment to have brought to such a small and personal conclusion.

Short had been his shrift-tried in seven days, sentenced in six days more, executed in another month-not seven weeks in all; but in that time he rounded life with the accuracy and completeness of a comet predicted and fulfilled. His foolishness ended at his taking, and his greatness began in his failure. The letters he answered, the speech he made in court, his consistency and simplicity, had a moral influence feebly prefigured by the reckless Samson pulling the heathen temple down. Of Samson had remained only strength; of Brown, no strength-only testimony.

The abolitionist-that unseen terror-had at last been captured and displayed in the slave States, and probably the only perfect specimen. Nearly every one of the same genus who had been privy to his plans retreated from the responsibility, and left him on the enemy's side, a deadly hostage, subtle as wisdom itself.

Quantrell, Booth, and Beall, the youthful trio we are to carry through our narrative, all heard John Brown when he rose in court to answer why sentence should not be passed upon him.

His head still ringing with sword-strokes, and his side and kidneys wounded, he was able, by long absorption of his theme, to preach upon it without preparation, and to the most modest and wondrous effect.

He rose from his blanket and cot, like Lazarus from the dead, all bandaged and feeble, and said that he had come to Virginia to set free slaves:

Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great," said John Brown, "and suffered and

sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment."

His tones were almost hesitating, and therefore the quiet meaning felt its way along the heart-strings as art could never do. Glancing, in need of an idea, at the little Bible by the judge, the old man, touching sixty years of age and looking seventy, raised his mighty plaint again:

"I see a book kissed in this court which I suppose to be the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction; for I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered, as I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, is no wrong, but right.”

Those high words had been a felony spoken anywhere in Virginia except in court, and for the first time in thirty years they were now legally proclaimed. The judge was presiding at an abolition meeting, and was powerless to arrest an orator who came shod in the supernal light of martyrdom. Poor men without slaves heard the gospel where no misinterpretation could distort the preacher's nature, and the great slaveholders would feign have cried out in chagrin, as in a noble poem, contemporary with John Brown, "Hadst thou sought the whole State over, there was no one place so secret-no high place nor lowly place where thou couldst have escaped me— save on this very scaffold." *

He continued, and they felt it was a gentleman who now spoke, whatever he may have been before:

"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions, in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by the wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done!"

Quantrell's eyes filled with tears at the recollection of Brown's dying sons, who had gone in bloody testimony before him. He heard other sobs, also, in that long, deep court-room, with people standing in window-sills, and oil-lamps feebly lighting the packed

*"The Scarlet Letter."

inclosure; but the voice of Booth rebuked those symptoms, audibly saying:

“The damned, black-hearted villain !”

“Heart black as a stove-pipe!" muttered the tight-shut skull of young Mr. Beall,

The old man now thanked the court, the neighboring society, and the jury courteously, and those who had prematurely muttered against him grew small in their own esteem. He disclaimed any design of treason or general insurrection, merely desiring to take people out to liberty. Nor had he misled any, many of his volunteers having been strangers to him, and most of them had paid their own expenses to death.

Thus he disposed of the impression sought to be made by some Northern lawyers, afraid to defend freedom from freedom's side, and destroyed the stigma that he, an old, wise man, had decoyed some boys to danger. The little army of fanaticism was made to stand equal everywhere upon the high ground of principle.

Only one man applauded when he was sentenced, and him the judge severely rebuked, so that in after-years he was afraid to shout at all, and grew timid of his own natural emotions.

Little Ned Coppock had been tried, as John Brown came up for sentence, and when they sentenced him, who was almost a favorite with the populace, so fair and young he was, Ned also spoke:

"I never committed murder. When I escaped to the enginehouse and found the captain and his prisoners surrounded there, I saw no way of deliverance but by fighting a little. If anybody was killed on that occasion, it was in a fair fight.”

Coppock had been a poor orphan boy, but the Quaker who raised him found somewhere in him the spirit of the wild copack, or Russian lanceman, whence may have come his name; and when John Brown discovered him in Iowa he entered the crusade cordially, and it was not to his disparagement in Virginia that he had fought bravely. He stood up to be sentenced with his arms behind him, abreast of John Cook, whose arms were folded; and between them stood two negroes, Green, the South Carolinian, and Copeland from Oberlin-a college which educated blacks with whites.

Green was from Charleston-the city which was to begin the war -a runaway slave, and he had fought revengefully. Copeland had been raised of Virginia seed in Ohio. These two, the least culpable in motive there, were the most friendless; but Virginia took distinc

tion that day that she, alone of the slave States, probably, would do no more than punish them equally like the white invaders. Farther south they would have died by torture.

John E. Cook, the most befriended of any by relatives and power, and he alone dressed newly and well, was the most unhappy person in the band. The rest had put life behind them, and were resigned to die, while he had been tempted to confess upon his comrades, as he had also been the Hebrew spy upon Virginia, and therefore his intelligence did him no credit, being unaccompanied with constancy. A thread of self-love and glorifying went through his natural courage and left him unsupported in despondency, but, as his life was taken at last, he died manfully, and might have left a noble figure with his delicate outlines and better mental organization than the rest. It would seem from John Brown's final rebuke of him that Cook had proceeded to Harper's Ferry in advance, upon his own motion chiefly, liking the adventure even better than the cause.

Stevens was tried reclining on the court-room floor, with his back against a mattressed chair, old slippers on his feet, and his head in a kerchief. He accepted no favors, looked with contempt on court and foe, regarded John Brown as less of a military genius than he had supposed, and for the rest cared nothing; since he joyously believed in spirit-people, and meant his death to be a visitation.

Hazlett, who had also been recaptured, was a plain, dull Pennsylvanian; for the little roster of Brown's daring lads covered many States-Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina; and Kansas had been their military academy.

In spite of their injury to Jefferson County, Virginia, its people were seldom harsh with these strangers. The Teutonic wave rippling through that region was mild and laving, and in many a farmhouse lay Kercheval's old "History of the Valley," saying: "Twentyfour hours never pass during which my imagination does not present me with the afflicting view of the slave; and my consolation was that the master would receive the punishment due to his cruelty, while the slave should find rest from his toils and sufferings in the kingdom of heaven!"

This conscience ran through all grades in Virginia, from the Governor of the State, at Richmond, to the jailer at Charlestown. "I am in charge of a jailer," the old man wrote to his family, "like