their dogs, assisted by Albion, smelling and seeking everywhere, but in vain.

"We may be mistaken," said one of the men, a little pale, and hitching up his wet water-proof boots," but we shall now search the house."

"There's nothing there," Lloyd Quantrell sternly interposed, "and now I'll pepper both your dogs with my gun, as I have promised."

Lloyd started at a quick stride toward the wagon at the end of the lane. He had walked but a step, however, when a voice was heard to cry:

"Coom on! Te niggers is here, poys, and te reward is mine, py Jing!"

At the end of the little lane, the black boy before observed, with the old negro man upon his back, was receding and trembling before Lloyd Quantrell's gun cocked at Andrew Atzerodt's shoulder.

"I shoost found tis gun in te wagon," Atzerodt exclaimed, “and took it and headed off tese niggers after tey had walked ofer me in tis lane."

The hunters and their dogs dashed forward; the young man was overthrown and the old man fell heavily to the ground, and the wild dogs set upon them till dragged away.

When silence was restored after the baying thunder, the old black man still lay where he had fallen, and the younger man, bloody and nearly naked after struggling with the dogs, looked down upon him in despair.

"Father!" he cried, “is you hurt? Oh, speak to me, father!" With a painful effort the old man turned from his side to his back, looked up into his son's face with a convulsive shudder of his lineaments, and saying, “Honey, I's mos' gone," straightened out, stone dead.

The young man knelt, clammy with the sweat for life and freedom, and raising his hands, clasped together, above his head, sobbed out the words:

"Father! Daddy! Don't die now, when I'se carried ye so fur. I'll go back to ole missis and take it all on me!"

The old man's jaw had fallen; his gray hairs only moved in the mountain zephyrs; he seemed worn out with age and terror, and very quiet in the light of God.

"Oh!" shouted the young man, turning toward the spectators of

the scene, his hands still lifted prayerfully together, "kill me, won't you, and let me reign with daddy?—Reign, Lord!" he screamed with sudden, awful ecstasy, “and let me die and reign with father, too. I kin die under de whip if I kin reign!”

His streaming eyes were strained with this religious despair, till their gleaming pupils grew small upon the great white disks of his eyeballs. He was a sinewy, high-purposed young man, and the dogs came forward and glared at him as if he might be dangerous yet.

But as he prayed for human hands to give him death, his own long toil in night and storm, bramble and mountain, carrying that old man, and the excitement of his sorrow, threw him in a fit upon the earth-blind, silent, desolate.

The handcuffs of the Logans were fastened on his wrists, even before he fell, and while he appealed to human nature and to God.

"Off with him, while he's quiet!" spoke the elder Logan to his brother. "There's no reward for the older chap, and so we'll leave his body here for the neighbors, or the birds."

The two short, thick-set men, tying the unconscious negro's limbs, lifted him on their shoulders and started to go.

'Stop!" interposed Andrew Atzerodt; "I caught dat nigger, and want my money for him."

"The reward is three hundred dollars," replied the slave-dealer; "here is a hundred for your share, if you put in no further claim."

He passed a bank-note to the haggard man, who looked at it with fervor and accepted it, and then, turning to Nelly Harbaugh in a moment of revulsion and triumph, he cried:

"I earn nothing? Heigh? I can't support a wife? Heigh? Take it, Nelly, and I'll pecome a nigger-ketcher and make you rich, Py Jing!"

The girl seemed attracted by so much money. She hesitated. Off with you!" hoarsely spoke Luther Bosler. "It is te Sabbath, and I would not fight. But this insult to a lady excites me. Plood-money to a woman engaged to be married to an honest man ? "

His slow, intense exasperation was like some giant's aroused power-infectious, because so deep and real. Lloyd Quantrell felt it, and wresting his gun from Atzerodt's hand, he cried:

"Luther, I'm with you. We two can clean all three of these ruffians out."

He looked at his caps and raised the bright twisted barrel. The dogs perceived disorder near and growled ominously.

"You are too good a citizen, Bosler, to break the law," exclaimed the slave-taker. "Let us go in peace. We only do our duty under the compromise laws of the United States and the warrant of the State of Virginia."

"Put down that man!" Lloyd Quantrell said to the speaker, with the cool zest of collision in him.

"I'll put him down," the mountain ranger answered, "at the town of Harper's Ferry, and not before!"

The two girls became alarmed at the scene before them, and Atzerodt moved toward his horse.

"Go!" spoke Luther Bosler, with deadly calm. “God's vengeance hovers ofer tis guilty land!”

"It will come to-night!" pealed the deep tones of Hannah Ritner, as she walked forward. "Let me prophesy with head uncovered, as the Scripture commands woman to do!"

She threw her hat upon the ground and turned her face to the south. Her long, wild hair she threw behind her shoulders with sudden nervous energy, and her large dark eyes seemed inverted and gazing inward, and her tones were like a woman's who had never spoken with human people, but had wandered alone, talking loudly with herself.

my house and The mountain The cry of the

"These are the two angels sent to Sodom "-she indicated the slave-catchers. "Turn in, my lords, and tarry in wash your feet! For ye are compassed round. fires shall drown ye and yon city to which ye go. poor, waxed great before God's face, calls for destruction, and it will not be put off. I see the chimneys reel, the hearth-stone shattered, the churches hollow, and the rivers flowing red. Escape? Ye can not! Brimstone and fire shall mingle this night, and the smoke of the country go up as the smoke of a furnace!"

She ceased, as if still talking to herself. The dogs whined, and the men looked at each other.

"She's crazy," said Lew Logan.

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'Come, leave her," spoke his brother Ben; we are twenty miles from Harper's Ferry."

They went at a rapid walk up the gorge, followed by Atzerodt.

A moment after they had disappeared from view, Hannah Rit

ner, resuming her natural tones, turned to the remaining persons and said:

You will be late at love-feast. I thought to go there with you. But I must take a long ride."

As they were getting into the wagon, she went past on a nimble-footed saddle-horse, dropping them a courteous farewell.

"It seems to me I have seen a horse like that before," Lloyd Quantrell thought; "she's mounted like a huntress."

CHAPTER VIII.

BEAVER CREEK DUNKERS.

ALL made spasmodic remarks, with no great intelligibility of plan or reflection, on the foregoing scene-the law to capture and return fugitive slaves having been in recent years established by Congress with the aid of all the great statesmen and the President of the United States, for the purpose of composing the country, which seemed, indeed, perfectly tranquil now, excepting many such agonizing episodes as that just given, but which it was thought unpatriotic and disturbing to describe or discuss.

"What was your fortune, Katy?" Lloyd asked as they came to the top of a hill and saw before them a bounding prospect of fields uptilted, and woods in plumes and crowns, giving every well-plowed farm a human look like hair worn strong, yet comely.

'Hush, Lloyd!" Katy said, "it was not good; so let me be still and think of the Lord's supper till we come to church.”

"Yonder is Beaver Creek Dunker meeting-house," Nelly Harbaugh spoke to Lloyd, indicating nearly two miles away a low white building like a long school-house half sunken behind a moundy brown hill, and defined against a higher crest of green. At the foot of the hills they descended, woods and notches in the bottoms were signs of a stream there, and the far eastern horizon rose up like a mighty rampart as if it were an ocean's confines. "That is the Antietam country," Luther exclaimed, “and Peaver Creek is a part of it. Our mother, Nelly, was from Antietam, put she loved Peaver Creek pecause she met father there one love-feast week. Tey slept in te garret of te church, as us Tun

kers do, and many a marriage, Nelly, comes out of tese homely ways we haf of living like te tisciples, watching with our Master, and eating of te Passover lamb."

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Passover!" exclaimed Lloyd; "that's a Jew jubilee of some kind, I reckon ?"

"Yes, and all te early Christians were Jews. When te Lord slew te first-born of all te Egyptians, te Jews in Egypt killed a lamb and marked teir doors, so te angel of death would see te lamb's plood-mark and go past. Tey always eat te Passover afterward, and so did te Christian Jews, and so do we. Tunkers and Moravians, I pelieve, is all that does it now. Te sacrament is not te love-feast, put te Lord's supper. We keep te feast; we kill a lamb, and Jew and Catholic is welcome. We don't drive te hungry away like Saint Paul; for it can't pe any harm in peing hungry."

"Ah! Luther," Lloyd exclaimed, "Judas was at the last supper, and got the sop above all the others. Money was what ailed him. Are not you good Dutch fond of money?"

"Luther worships it," Nelly Harbaugh exclaimed, patting her lover on the back. "He and his father want to be rich and nothing else. If I was rich I would want more than that: education, admiration, and splendor. But I can make Luther love them, too, and bring them to me."

"Money," Luther reflected aloud, "is te convenient result of industry and care. Whatever else we want, money fetches it. We Dutch puys land with it for our children."

Nelly blushed as he looked at her.

"Her first blush," Lloyd Quantrell thought, "since I have seen her. Then she loves that man! She will not blush for me."

"We can not spend our money, Lloyd," Luther continued, "if we keep diligent, pecause we have no fashions. Our clothes is te same from year to year. We do not take usury, so we do not take risks, and we do not go to law to maintain corrupting lawyers who create quarrels; Tunkers never sue one another. Te man who cheats, cheats only himself. We never fight, nor swear, nor shave our peards; so we require no barbers. Our women work and do not strain the men for their luxury. Children are plenty here, and we puy more land for tem. Education is good if it does not make people saucy and tisputatious and lazy; occupation is te only thing that peats education. Te world has plenty if people live simple