"My deliverer! My only friend!" cried Nelly, held in his muscular arms and respectfully drawn to his breast, like Jessica to Lorenzo, and kissed once in manly compassion with the barest tremor of affection. "Enter Miss Starr's name. Discharged on Mr. John Wilkes Booth's recognizance! Take this man Logan's fine, and throw him out of the building!" As Logan passed Nelly and Mr. Booth on the street, his chagrin of animal and social expectations vented itself in one unfortunate remark: 'Run away with a fancy actor, heigh?" Booth had knocked him into the street before his sentence was well finished. “Kill him! kill him!" commanded the girl, her intense feelings breaking in the fierce shout for blood and reparation. The slave-catcher was followed up by the actor's cool, enjoying, and skilled pugilism, tumbled over every time he arose, headed off at every point of escape, and finally he ran back into the stationhouse for protection. "Do you know that he has bruised your face-the coward!" Booth said, panting, as he walked along. “Your friends can't see you for a week with that scar. The officer at the theatre had sent for me, suspecting that you had made a mistake in going into that vile gallery, Nelly, and he said you mentioned my name to him. How natural that you should think of me; for you have been in my mind all day! Come in!" He led the way into an oyster-house, and to a private room up the stairs. She thanked him with gratitude and pride. "You, John-to think of me with all your prospects and acquaintances? Oh, is it true, or made believe?" "I love you," replied the actor, in tones low and firm, articulated like chimes of steel, and his dark eyes shining the eloquence of passion. "I feel my fate in your untrained and strong maturity. You can not evade me, Nelly. I demand that you feel my will and love me, now." He took her hands in his, and held her off, and looked his strength and gentleness together, and slowly drew her to him. "I have earned a kiss of real affection. I must have it." He clasped her to his athletic frame, still in the manly tingling of the conflict with her enemy, and ardent with victory and invincible masculine resolution. The old gun of her father was not above the door; her strength of citadel and rural independence was gone. He kissed her in her betrothed one's place and with a betrothed one's confidence. "Your name is Nelly Starr hereafter; for you are to be my star, and play such parts as Portia to me. I am going to Belair to study, and you shall be my pupil there; and so I gave your residence to the police as at that haunt of my childhood where our family grew up. All arrangements are made. I am to be the only Booth in the Southern States, and make my fortune there.-Waiter, some wine and terrapin ! !” “You do admire me, John? Can you even love me?" “I swear, Nelly, to be devoted to you alone-to lay my youth before your beauty, and to cherish and worship you! All that you can learn shall be taught you. All the career I can reach, you shall share and conquer in; but my admiration is not equal to my love. Your stalwart beauty has been walking in my dreams like the long shadow you cast upon the valley as you walk at sunrise on your mountains. Begin the world anew, with people worthy of your queenly endowments and a gentleman for your lord and knight; and that the disgraceful past may be forever behind you, come to my arms and heart at once, with faith and perfect love!" It was not yet day at Abel Quantrell's residence when Luther Bosler came down the stairs with Katy, his to-be-banished sister, and wondering where Nelly could be. Light Pittson came out of the library to meet them. “Has she not returned?” Light queried. “I have waited all night to let her in. There is some one knocking now." She opened the door, and a boy appeared with a letter for Miss Kate Bosler. 66 Oh, gracious! read it, Miss Light," spoke Katy; "I can't read writing fery well. It must be from Lloyd." Light turned up the lamp, and Katy read these blurred, misspelled lines: "Darling, good-by! I expect some day to be your sister, when Luther loves me more than money and his Dunker dunces. Tell him he can not become so ambitious, but I will try to rise worthy of him in mind; for God knows I shall love him forever, whether I be good or evil. NELLY." Luther stood with his whip in hand and robe across his arm, staggering and pale against the door. 66 She has gone," he said; "I am punished for loving money too sinfully. Hannah Ritner predicted te yellow star would fade at morn. It is just morning, Katy. I feel my heart is proken!" He was comforted in the arms of Katy and of Light Pittson. "I will kiss you a better morning, dear friend," Light Pittson said, “and a wife more worthy of your sincere nature." With that kiss upon his brow, Luther drove out of Baltimore, silent and resigned, yet with a great emptiness in his breast. He did not know that from an upper window, as he went by, Nelly Harbaugh was gazing down, at hollow dawn, with streaming eyes and misery unrelieved by resignation. CHAPTER XXXIII. LOVE'S FIERCE PROBATION. THE executions at Charlestown ended in the middle of March, 1860, with Stevens and Hazlett going manfully to death. Three months before this, four of Brown's men were executed in one day -the two negroes, Green and Copeland, an hour earlier than Cook and Ned Coppock. These latter, the night before death, made an attempt to escape, which might have been successful but for the accident of Quantrell, Booth, and Atzerodt being in an office across the way, amusing some friends. Quantrell had Katy Bosler's accordion, playing airs, and Booth recited ballads and scraps from plays, while Atzerodt was the cupbearer, and ran errands to the tavern. He came up-stairs, crying: "Py Jing! I saw a man's head git on te jail-wall !” Booth, who had made the punishment of these men a fierce if gratuitous duty, at once ran down and notified the guard. A watch was set, and this time two heads instead of one appeared, and a man, identified by all as Cook, leaped on the wall, and was menaced by the guard below with his bayonet. "Jump on him, John, and bear him to the ground!" the whisper of Coppock came up from the jail-yard. Cook hesitated, and the guard also seemed dazed. "Let them escape, boys," Quantrell whispered, where he and his companions crouched together; "think how young they are, like ourselves! That guard may have been tampered with." "No, sir," Booth retorted, no mercy to them!" but, before he could raise the alarm, Atzerodt, with the avarice for a reward, sprang up and shouted: "You tam guard, why don't you fire?" "Murder! Escape! Treason!" cried Booth. The guard now threatened the prisoners, and they dropped behind the wall, while Charlestown streets filled with excited soldiery and civilians. It was reported that these two lads had used their knives and forks to dig through the jail-wall; but Quantrell suspected otherwise, from an incident which took place after the execution. Certain women from the North, in spite of all precautions, by patience and refined address, had obtained communication with the prisoners. Among these had been Hannah Ritner, and Quantrell met her the night after the executions, when vigilance was relaxed and conviviality had succeeded the panic. She was at one of the hotels in Harper's Ferry, and had assisted to reclaim the forfeited bodies. Her name was a fictitious one upon the register; but Lloyd, who had endeavored to understand her in vain, took Booth to call on her after a horseback-ride past Mr. Beall's. She was sad and troubled. The errand she had come upon was not these poor, staring dead, but their living forms, and malice had intervened. She heard the tale-how Cook and Coppock had reached on the gallows for each other's hands, and said good-by affectionately on the brink of the dark unknown; and she heard, trembling, how Booth and Atzerodt had discovered their attempt to escape, while Quantrell "weakened," and desired not to intercept them. At this moment Atzerodt, who had become an intolerable parasite of the two young men, made his way to the room, and stood confounded to see, in the full dress of a Quaker lady, the prophetess of the mountains. "Py Jing!" he muttered-"te witch of Shmoketown!" "You have asked me more than once to tell your fortune, Andrew Atzerodt," the dark and passion-possessed woman exclaimed, rising. "I never supposed, till cruelty took possession of your frail and prating nature, that Fate had the least concern in you. Hold out your hand, sir!-And you two gentlemen as well! The opportunity is condign." She meant Booth, Beall, and Quantrell. They extended their hands. She looked the palms over, and the faces as well, and labored within herself like a Pythoness in pain. Then, beginning with Quantrell, she spoke these lines, at the outset tenderly, but, in the sequel, to Lloyd's companions, with a haughty power above all plays and players: "He whose heart to pity swells, In his fever shall spring wells! She ended with her dark hair raveling through her distraught fingers, and her arms spread wide, as if she implored the vision she described in rhyme. "Come away!" muttered Atzerodt, in terror; "she has fits, and pites beople!" "Truly a nice, comforting hostess," added Booth, undisturbed; “but I never did like above a drop of water, and, as for the cord, we'll ring it for a bottle of whisky." Edgar Pittson had been almost as true a prophet as Hannah Ritner. Scarcely had the last man been hanged in Virginia, when the Democratic party convention of all the Union was held at Charleston in South Carolina, and the slave States withdrew, because they could not make a President to force slavery into Kansas, whence John Brown and his sons had expelled it. This convention adjourned to Baltimore, but, before it reconvened, Abraham Lincoln had been nominated by the young Republican party in the nearly as obscure city of Chicago. Another world had grown up beyond the termination of the old Maryland National Road, and all the presidential candidates, four in number of whom three received their nominations in Baltimorewere from this West-Lincoln, Douglas, Breckenridge, Bell. The loins of free labor made such increase, that counting slaves as votes had ceased to be a counterpoise. Ever since Presidents of the United States had been nominated by delegate or popular conventions, Baltimore city had been the |