while, in fact, with a whetted self-consciousness provincial patriotism alone could so deform. Some assured her of "true Virginia hospitality" if she should ever visit their respective counties-she who was to know upon the morrow the pang of widowhood and want, and in whose life, for years past, the acquisition of a calico dress was an historical period!

But of that fantastic staff how many were to fall and clutch the turf, crying on God and mother, and forgetting that Virginia ever was!

It seemed a comfort to her, after a quarter of an hour of ill-timed smirks and inanities, to be taken aside by Mrs. Avis, the jailer's wife, and searched for implements of suicide; but Mrs. Avis knew John Brown would never take his own life, and her hands had the tenderness of caresses. There was the real and memorable hospitality of Virginia, in that shoemaker-jailer's family, facing the roar of merciless millions, who called for severity to Brown's men, but saying back, "These are my captives and my guests." Such jailers, a little later, might have made prison-pens also pitiful.

The jailer alone remained in the little parlor with the condemned man and his wife, although Taliaferro broke in once, to say that they could only have two hours, and then gave them four, for he was a kinder man than his wind.

The resolute woman of forest stature and manual labor's mold went up to John Brown and called him "Father." He was the only father she knew; for, marrying him at half his age, when she was of only sixteen years, she paid the penalty childhood, like Ruth, pays to old Boaz and his prospects and intellect.

He was then postmaster, surveyor, tanner, and town-maker, with the dogmatic will of one predestined to be restless all his days. He led her continually into the deserts, and left her there, and went off on some inspired freak of ruin, leaving little babes around her, and even a babe to come; and when she gave him her destiny and tenderness in charge, he already had been the father of seven children, five of them alive.

He gave her the life of a poor white, aggravated by the splendid illusions of a schemer and a dreamer, and the end of the dream had

come.

He had levied upon her sons, the support of her mountain-patch of land, and taken them to death, with their widows to be left upon her care. Thirteen children had she borne this old man, the sire of

twenty; and to-morrow he was to die, and bequeath her only his body.

He took her in his arms, and in his white beard lay her face, as often she had thrown it into the fleece she spun for his clothing in his absence, wondering if he could be dead. The spasm of her broad shoulders showed that she was weeping, and the gurgle of the spirit within, breaking over this last flinty barrier, sobbed forth a few times; but he stood like a rock used to the flood and full of its moss and lichens; the tears that wet his face were the splashings of hers. He was pitying her and Nature, but not himself.

She looked up, and saw him so natural and strong, and dried her tears, still leaning on his mouth; for she looked like his buxom daughter, and only his shaft-like head made him higher than hers.

"Father," she said, "they let me come to see you at last.”

He kissed her, and asked for the widows he had made and the children he was never to see.

“Mary,” said he, “is grandfather's old granite tombstone set up by the big rock at North Elby?"

"Yes, father, with son Freddy's name under your grandfather's, who fit in the Revolution."

"I value it highly," said John Brown, "for I am the first of my family ever put in jail; and, Mary, I want my name to go by Grandfather John Brown's. A revolutionary soldier, too, I hope I was.”

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'Papa, we don't accuse you. You thought it was right. We think so, too."

"Three of my sons, killed in this war for liberty, I want remembered by an inscription on that stone. Grandfather and me will make two more. I have loved this life, wife, so much, I want to leave a line upon a stone."

His ambition was greater than the expectations of religion, for he had found that tombstone the day he ordered his deadly pikes from the blacksmith, by his grandfather's grave.

The tombstone being discharged from his mind, Captain Brown settled into a contented mood, and sat down to the meal the good jailer furnished, eating sparingly, and with business references to small matters of property; for he adhered to the idea, and his wife also, that he was a great master of affairs, and had always failed through the incompetence of the times, seasons, and agents. He asked if his wife could not remain with him that night and depart with his mold next day, instead of retiring, as if she were a whole

army, to Harper's Ferry, eight miles away, and there await his dumb remains. The request was denied; for the rabble clamcred about the jail, and the moral pulse of the State was in a high fever. So Brown settled down to read his will, which the jailer witnessed.

It was a will of souvenirs, and not property: the tombstone, his surveyor's compass, a silver watch, a glass, a lost gun, Bibles, and debts. He wanted all his little debts paid, even to people whose names he had forgotten. When this was ended, the old man looked quite comfortable and commercial; for his ideas never had failed to impress his family, and the departure he was to take on the morrow seemed only a larger journey and with no traveling expenses to provide. Strange that he had read the Bible every day of his life, and forgot it now! We all think we shall die anticipating, but we die retrospecting, and preparing for this world. It was, probably, with an insight into his high, ambitious, Puritan nature, that Mary Anne Brown inquired:

"Father, wasn't you disappointed at being took so soon?"

"My dear," the old man said, with a nervous twitch, his hairy forehead wrinkled speculatively, and his gray eyes preoccupied, "the errors of my plan were decreed before the world was made, and I had no more to do with the course I pursued than the shot leaving a cannon has to do with the spot where it shall fall."

'Pappy," she said, the last word being a cry that struck the jailer's heart," didn't you suffer when Olly died, and our oldest boy, Watty?"

"No pain is like our offspring's death," the old man said, with his right shoulder pushed forward as if to lean upon some spirit unseen; 'I loved my children, Mary; you have seen me nurse them weeks at a time. But I saw them die without tears, they were so brave."

All trembling, the large child-woman rose and meant to say something proudly, but it would not articulate.

"I have no boy left," she meant to say, "and you will be taken, too."

"Courage, wife! We have made our mark on this world by our failure. Death is the incident of a great purpose. There is a bright morning and a glorious day. Moderate circumstances, Mary, is the best blessing of this life. By poverty and failure I have been preserved to do this work. It is done; and I shall see our sons

and daughters who have gone before-the three babes who were buried in one grave, the three grown ones who died for liberty. The blessing of our offered blood will follow you for all the remainder of your days.* See this, Mary!”

He took up a newspaper and read a message from the Governor of South Carolina, which had just come to hand, threatening secession in the event of a "Black Republican" being elected President, and also a legislative act, as follows:

"Resolved, That the State of South Carolina is ready to enter, together with the other slaveholding States, or such as desire present action, into the formation of a Southern Confederacy.”

She did not understand it, or was in .grief too profound to try; but he explained to her that he had forced slavery to become revolutionary, and made the Union of the American States the national cause, and involved it with the fall of slavery.

She listened with interest at last, and so he absorbed the time till she was commanded to go, and his failure took the light in her loyal nature of a postponed success.

Proudly she repulsed the insinuations of the smirker who assured her, returning to Harper's Ferry, that slavery was a gentle boon to white and black.

Every child of John Brown believes he died for the greatest cause in this world," she retorted, "and so do I."

Having had his way and will to the last, John Brown went forth to die next day, taking no pains with his toilet, and wearing the same clothes in which he had fought, and an old slouched hat. He gave what silver change he possessed to his fellow-prisoners, and admonished them to die like men, and never spoke to Hazlett, lest the identification might be testimony against him.

Stepping forth in the public street of Charlestown with cords upon his arms, the old man was indifferent to his coffin in the little wagon and to the movements of the military; but when the young wheat in the winter fields met his gaze, and the fodder-rows of russet maize, and the winding mountains in the near east, he felt the farmer in his blood again, and not the radical.

'This is a beautiful country. It is the first time I have seen it just here."

* She survived John Brown twenty-five years, and lived to see a statue of him voted by Kansas to the national capital, and his scaffold sold in pieces valuable as their weight in silver.

Life swelled in his nostrils, and the sense of beauty that is the joy forever. He looked on those blue and mellow mountains to the last, thinking of nothing else, except that the boys and citizens ought not to have been kept from the execution-field.

It was a privilege to see him die, beyond the death of any man yet known in America who had chosen the gallows for his deathbed. Some who had looked into his genealogy thought they saw in his face and works signs of all the races that were united in him: English Puritan, Holland Dutchman, Welsh-the stocks of Hampden, De Ruyter, and Jefferson.

He climbed the scaffold first, shook off his hat, thanked all for favors, and over his kindly smile the death-cap was drawn.

“I can't see, gentlemen. You must lead me," the muffled voice petitioned to be led to the death-trap.

He did not desire to publicly speak, though it had been forbidden. The only inhumanity he suffered was the delay of the militia, who were made to march, countermarch, face outward and inward, and repel an invisible attack. There was one side of the hollow square left open, where the sun was shining overhead.

“I am ready at any time," was extorted from his lips at last; "do not keep me waiting!"

The scaffold-trap then opened beneath his feet, like the wicket of heaven on golden hinges turning, and all that was erratic in the old man's life straightened on the silver cord that let him down into the bosom of the Valley.

In after-years the armies there faced every way, to repel insidious Liberty seeking to come in, but it was let down from a side they had not thought to guard.

CHAPTER XXXI.

DISINTEGRATION.

LUTHER BOSLER had learned, by the John Brown raid, a lesson nearly forgotten among the Maryland Germans, with their other Pennsylvania Dutch antecedents-of which was their dialect, fast turning into unadorned English-namely, the ready money of going to market.

He and his father would now rise by the moon and get the