tient and ungovernable. A frequent errand of the go-between was to sell slaves on which he had a lien or heritage-right, and then run away from the war, and be sleek and compromising. The citizens of Maryland soon lost many of their slaves, although the Union army would return these and get no thanks; while some of the slaves remained in nominal bondage in order to enjoy the profits and vices of the contraband trade. Along the Virginia shore batteries were thrown up to annoy shipping bound for Washington and the army; light gunboats cruised the river, and finally destroyed most of the yawls and skiffs on the Maryland side; but there were women to do the work of spies after the men had been intimidated, and who trusted to the faith of men in women and men's untoward mercy for their safety. In the residences, standing high on the bluffs below Pope's Creek, a shawl or a dress would appear at a garret-window and be read by Quantrell's telescope to mean-" Danger! Beware!" A woman's hand had stretched it, and perjury had been willful in her soul; for the government administered oaths of allegiance to all who preferred its protection, or sent them within the insurgent lines. When this signal appeared, no boat would leave Virginia; when it was withdrawn, the rebellion mail-boat darted out in the neutral light between sunset and the hour of setting the night-patrol, and came unobserved to the foot of the bluffs of shell and clay, left the mail in a hollow tree, took the return mail previously put there, and so glided back to Virginia like a water-snake. The United States never exerted its repressive hand like the fierce enemy; and so the wages of avarice or mischief outbid the mild, occasional punishment of the spy, until one day, when it was too late, and the world was in woe, a single woman paid the penalty of her sex; and the gallows, which should have met Lloyd Quantrell's telescope when he peered out at Maryland, became the solemn conclusion of the war. Atzerodt went into the trade of running the lines, and became more wretched and blustering than ever; he would also drive spies and strangers toward Washington, stopping at Surratt's tavern. Nelly Starr and Booth passed the Potomac one day northward, apparently reconciled, and Booth had a new piece of poetry he repeated with admiration, which had been written in Louisiana, to seduce Maryland to take the leap from treason's Tarpeian rock. It was set to the German air of " Tannenbaum," and said: "Hark to a wandering son's appeal, My mother State! to thee I kneel, For life or death, for woe or weal, And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel, "Dear mother! burst the tyrant's chain, Virginia should not call in vain— She meets her sisters on the plain ; Arise in majesty again, Maryland! my Maryland!" Booth had a mind up to the instinctive grade of this poetry, and no higher. He had been in the military lines a very little while, and found discipline too tame for his nature, and so he was leaving the South to fly from its sacrifices, but gorged with the consideration he had received there. "What are you going to do, John?" "Lloyd, I'll try the stage in the Yankee States awhile, but they never warmed to my style up there. If I fail, I shall go into some of their speculations and make a ståke out of them, and then—” "John, are you going to take all that money you drew from the Southern people, out of their country? If you are really a brave man, send it to your mother, and come into the ranks!" Booth bent his face to Quantrell's ear as he stepped into the canoe, and whispered: "My boy, you'll hear from me before this war is over!" Lloyd did hear from John Beall, before the war had well begun. That young man of twenty-six, tortured with apprehensions and by furies, had nearly departed for the Western States to be out of "O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum ! Wie grün sind deine Blätter!" the reach of the war; but, sucked into its Maelstrom, he stood, on the second anniversary of Captain John Brown's invasion, in the vicinity of his home, looking through the Lurlei's gap of Harper's Ferry, where ever sat the siren above the "Suck," and he saw the Union flag advancing, and the wide valley full of bayonets. "John Brown's re-enforcements have come at last, friend," spoke Quantrell, riding by. Lloyd had been given the congenial place of signal-man to General Joe Johnston, who was now trying to prove to his employers that Harper's Ferry was a hole and not a rampart -but neither government could believe it. In five minutes more, Mr. Beall, who had been shooting at the enemy" with the cheerless rage of a Covenanter on Magus Moor, was lying on the ground, with three ribs broken and an air-crack in his right lung. The district attorney, who had prosecuted John Brown to the gallows, picked the young man up and carried him to Charlestown, which was already familiar with another ballad of the war, sung in its streets by advancing and retreating thousands: "John Brown's knapsack is packed upon his back, Glory, glory, hallelujah! For his soul's marching on." The general to watch Harper's Ferry and prevent that hole from deserting somewhere, let the insurgent army behind it slip away through the Blue Ridge and swell the army on Manassas plateau ; and a battle took place, where three thousand fellow-countrymen gasped or sighed in pain and dissolution. 'John Brown's army has failed once more," thought Quantrell; 'but what a scare he gave us, as before!” The behavior of Lloyd in this battle was so fearless and cool, that he would have been promoted, except for three things—the universal desire for office and commissions; the utility of Lloyd to affect his native State in its peace and seclusion; and a whisper that he was unsound on Slavery as the particular lamb of Christ and main purpose of salvation. So he was sent back to the lower Potomac, to superintend the chief sally-port of the blockaded hydra, and there he waited to hear from his wife, in love's great thirst and hunger; while Hugh Fenwick, on the opposite shore, sent him reports of her spiritual condition-reminding him of Luther Bosler's hostility to rebels, and Jake Bos ler's hatred of all warriors and peace-breakers; and poor Lloyd had promised his father never to enter Maryland, and could verify nothing for himself. At last he did receive a letter in Katy's hand, and with Hugh Fenwick's addendum: "LLOYD: I haf been faithful. Haf you, Lloyd? Sir, I am a poor girl, and I haf no wedding-ring. People and eyes up in heafen, too, looks at me, Lloyd. You haf deceived me; but I bless you, if I must die! KATY." Quantrell had been playing Katy's accordion, and he took it up and drew a shriek of anguish from it to stifle his own. Queer pains had been in his head and back all that day, and his ears were buzzing; and as he read what Hugh Fenwick added, his eyes swam and he could not see: 66 LLOYD: Your wife has run away from home and can not be found. They say in the Catoctin Valley that you are the cause of it. She knows that in Richmond your heart and honor were transferred to Nelly Harbaugh, the actress, and it broke her heart. I pray for you and for the cause. Pray for me, who married you in error! You are free from Katy, and she is as your widow. Christie Eleison! + HUGH." "O Abel! my father!" cried Quantrell; "come to me in my desolation! Nothing is left but you-no mother, no country, no wife!" They said it was the bilious fever of the old Potomac country, which laid him for months on the bed of fire and ice, and raised him to be the shadow of himself. CHAPTER XXXVI. CRESCITE ET MULTIPLICAMINI. KATY had grown close to her brother in her desertion, and he, deserted by Nelly, made his sister his idol, and filled her pure soul with spiritual food. Suspecting that the flight of Lloyd had given her pain, Luther, never dreaming of his sister's matronhood, kept her tenderly at his side, and every Dunker congregation along the South and North Mountains, from Virginia to the Susquehanna, knew this constant couple. Long before day they would be up and away, to attend market at remote old towns like York, Carlisle, and Winchester; or auction-sales, to which the country people loved to repair; or Dunker love-feasts and celebrations. In those still, starlight times, in the hush of mountains and of woods, Luther told Katy of creeds, and heard her prattle of everything but that which made her soul cold with fear. Little did he know that the miracle was repeated of which he often preached, in that tiny form at his side, or that quickened spirits rode with him, and that they, twain, were not alone together. She, filled with the agony of a double secret, looked upon her brother as her priest and judge; but she dared not make him her confessor. That place Hugh Fenwick filled, and his consideration for Katy was equal to her brother's. She inspired love more now than ever, as she bloomed out of the scrawny stem of girlhood to life's accomplishment; and poor Jake Bosler, who had feared her nervous energy and premature passion of love were breaking her down, saw with joy that his child rounded and grew more beautiful, until she almost made him fear. "Katy leave fader-Bi'm-by," said Jake, thinking of marriage for his girl. "Fader," said Katy, "I must wait for Lloyd. Will te war last long, fader?" "Te city mans, Katy, fooled your little heart. Tere's Nelly down in Washington, gone from Luter to pe wicked. My little girl, if you would leave fader like dat, my heart would preak on my olty's grave." As Jake Bosler kissed her, he did not know the pain he had made. Katy prayed and prayed, and lay awake hearing the rain upon the roof, and walked to the window in the night and saw the valley, in ghostly sheets of fog, fall like a deluge around a nearly submerged world; or saw some red planet burn on the mountain's crest, like shame with leveled eye seeking her out. She lost her brother, too, when his rising indignation at the secession intrigues, and at repeated raids upon the Dunker valleys, recalled to his warm brain the soldierly prophecy of that singular woman who did not merely tell fortunes, but told, and instigated, |