hero did he deport himself! Grand in his assaults on the citadel of slavery, he became grander still as he calmly met his enemies, and told them of his purposes. Never boastful, he assumes nothing, but at the end, when asked to say why sentence of death should not be imposed upon him, he said: "The Court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the Law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things 'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me I should do even so to them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. 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 wicked, cruel and unjust enactments—I submit; so let it be done." Even if we grant that he was technically wrong we must accord to him the meed of perfect sincerity. Whatever his failings he had not that of lying. "Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." John Brown fulfilled the highest interpretation of this Scriptural maxim. The edict once published, and all over the North there was a feeling of the deepest sympathy. There was nothing that could be done. People must wait and meditate. Just enough more than a month to bring the execution on Friday was accorded the condemned man, for it was on Monday the 31st of October that the trial was ended, and the sentence was pronounced the following day.

During this month follow the letters, the sermons, the speeches, the editorials, the thinking, that were the immediate results of the attack. Never had the subject of Negro Slavery been so thoroughly ventilated. The liberation of the Slave was coming, and that speedily through the agency of Brown, but not in the way he had intended. While audiences throughout the North, and South, too, were roused to fever heat through the presentations, in different lights it is true, of this cause, the prime mover in the matter was making his final preparations for departure. Preparations, I say, not in the sense that we ordinarily give the word, for of his own future he had no doubt, but in that of care for the families of his stricken followers. To Mrs. Lydia Maria Child he writes asking her assistance in behalf of his daughters-in-law, whose husbands, his sons, fell by his side, three daughters, his wife, Mrs. Thompson whose husband fell at Harper's Ferry, and a son unable to wholly care for himself. To a Quaker lady of Newport, R.I., he sends asking her to write and to comfort the sad hearts at North Elba, Essex County, N.Y. To his wife "'Finally, my beloved, be of good comfort.' May all your names be 'written on the Lamb's book of life—may you all have the purifying and sustaining influence of the Christian religion is the earnest prayer of your affectionate husband and father, John Brown. P.S. I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day, nor a storm so furious or dreadful as to prevent the return of warm sunshine and a cloudless sky. But, beloved ones, do remember that this is not your rest; that in this world you have no abiding place or continuing city. To God and his infinite mercy I always commend you. J.B."

And thus he wrote to his half-brother, to his old schoolmaster, to his son Jason, and to many others. Every word is expressive of the deepest anxiety for the welfare of his loved ones, and a calm trust in the God of all as to the righteousness of his cause. Such words and such behaviour do not comport with the "black heart" which a large part of the nation was then ascribing to him. It is true, he told a clergyman of a Southern church who attempted to draw an argument in defence of Slavery, that he did not know the A B Cs of Christianity since he was entirely ignorant of the meaning of the word, "I, of course, respect you as a gentleman, but it is as a heathen gentleman." I can, myself, appreciate to some extent what must have been the feelings of the prisoner at the religious ministrations offered him; for I well remember with what a skeptical air I heard the prayer and the words of a Rebel clergyman who visited the prison in which I was confined in 1865. I knew he was daily praying God to bring defeat to my comrades in arms, to increase the number of prisoners, in fine, for the triumph of the Confederate cause. He undertook a pretty serious task, that of talking entertainingly in a general way to a company of Federal prisoners. Had he come to kneel by the side of a dying man, and to point the way to eternal life, it had been different; but for doctrinal policies what cared we? We had empty stomachs, and till they were filled all creeds were alike illusory. Preaching to hungry men was not a success, and he came but seldom—indeed I remember only once. Dead men were carried out daily, but they went unattended by religious rites. I recall now the thought, if God heard his prayer and answered it, of what avail was mine; but I was certain that mine was the one listened to, and that being the case, of what avail was his opinion on the state of the country any way? During these weeks the condemned man is visited by large numbers of people, both friends and foes; but before no one does he for a moment weaken in his constant declaration of the correctness of his cause. Some of the verbal shot that his proslavery interlocutors received were as hot as those which he fired from his musket into their midst on that terrible Monday—for instance, he told Col. Smith, of the Virginia Military Institute, that he would as soon be escorted to his death by blacklegs or robbers as by slave-holding ministers. Socrates, awaiting the death which slowly creeps from his extremities to his heart converses not more quietly and resignedly to those about him than does this decided old man of Harper's Ferry. One, a Stoic, discourses on Death and Immortality; and dying, desires his followers to offer a cock to Æsculapius. The other, a Christian, ceases not to converse concerning the wrongs of an oppressed race, and of his deep anxiety for the slaves; and his last written words were: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done." [December 2nd. 1859.]

Our retrospect would be incomplete did we not recall the events happening in this very City of Worcester, twenty-five years ago to-day. Never were the pulsations of the "Heart of the Commonwealth" more in accord with the heart beats of humanity than on that second of December, 1859. Whatever the thoughts and words of truckling people in other places, here the tolling bell spoke unmistakably to all who heard, the sorrow of those mourned the death of the Great liberator. The Spy of December 3d devotes two columns to an account of the observances in this city. From this description I learn that from ten o'clock, A.M. till noon, and again, from seven to seven and one-half o'clock, P.M., the bells of the Old South, the Central, the Union, and the Third Baptist churches were tolled. During the tolling of the bells in the forenoon, the engines at Merrifield's buildings, and at the card manufactory of T.K. Earle & Co., were stopped, while their places of business were closed, bearing appropriate symbols of regret and mourning. The colored people generally closed their places of employment, and engaged in appropriate religious exercises in Zion's Church in the afternoon.