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liberty, challenged his insulter to combat. Often, as at Pendennis Castle, when no other avengement was at hand, he would hurl on his foes such howling tempests of anathema, as fairly to shock them into retreat. Prompted by somewhat similar motives, both on shipboard and in England, he would often make the most vociferous allusions to Ticonderoga, and the part he played in its capture, well knowing, that of all American names, Ticonderoga was, at that period, by far the most famous and galling to Englishmen.

Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe Bellgarde inay shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness of Allen in England. True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers; for where modest gentlemanhood is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my Lord Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and bow, to a mad bull, in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness. When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was the view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency to self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude. Nor should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a Botany-Bay convict. If, at the present day, in any similar case between the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals: imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its former insulters.

As the event proved, in the course Allen pursued, he was right. Because, though at first nothing was talked of by his captors, and nothing anticipated by himself, but his ignominious execution, or, at the least, prolonged and squalid incarceration; nevertheless, these threats and prospects evaporated, and by his facetious scorn for scorn, under the extremest sufferings, he finally wrung repentant usage from his foes; and in

the end, being liberated from his irons, and walking the quarter-deck where before he had been thrust into the hold, was carried back to America, and in due time at New York, honorably included in a regular exchange of prisoners.

It was not without strange interest that Israel had been an eye-witness of the scenes on the Castle Green. Neither was this interest abated by the painful necessity of concealing, for the present, from his brave countryman and fellowmountaineer, the fact of a friend being nigh. When at last the throng was dismissed, walking towards the town with the rest, he heard that there were some forty or more other Americans, privates, confined on the cliff. Upon this, inventing a pretence, he turned back, loitering around the walls for any chance glimpse of the captives. Presently, while looking up at a grated embrasure in the tower, he started at a voice from it familiarly hailing him :

"Potter, is that you? In God's name how came you here?"

At these words, a sentry below had his eye on our astonished adventurer. Bringing his piece to bear, he bade him stand. Next moment Israel was under arrest. Being brought into the presence of the forty prisoners, where they lay in litters of mouldy straw, strewn with gnawed bones, as in a kennel, he recognized among them one Singles, now Sergeant Singles, the man who, upon our hero's return home from his last Cape Horn voyage, he had found wedded to his mountain Jenny. Instantly a rush of emotions filled him. Not as when Damon found Pythias. But far stranger, because very different. For not only had this Shingles been an alien to Israel (so far as actual intercourse went), but impelled to it by instinct, Israel had all but detested him, as a successful, and perhaps insidious rival. Nor was it altogether unlikely that Singles had reciprocated the feeling. But now, as if the Atlantic rolled, not between two continents, but two worlds-this, and the next-these alien souls, oblivious to hate, melted down into one.

At such a juncture, it was hard to maintain a disguise; especially when it involved the seeming rejection of advances like the sergeant's. Still, converting his real amazement into affected surprise, Israel, in presence of the sentries, declared to Singles that he (Singles) must labor under some unaccountable delusion; for he (Potter) was no Yankee

rebel, thank Heaven, but a true man to his king; in short, an honest Englishman, born in Kent, and now serving his country, and doing what damage he might to her foes, by being first captain of a carronade on board a letter-ofmarque, that moment in the harbor.

For a moment, the captive stood astounded; but observing Israel more narrowly, detecting his latent look, and bethinking him of the useless peril he had thoughtlessly caused to a countryman, no doubt unfortunate as himself, Singles took his cue, and pretending sullenly to apologize for his error, put on a disappointed and crest-fallen air. Nevertheless, it was not without much difficulty, and after many supplemental scrutinies and inquisitions from a board of officers before whom he was subsequently brought, that our wanderer was finally permitted to quit the cliff.

This luckless adventure not only nipped in the bud a little scheme he had been revolving, for materially befriending Ethan Allen and his comrades, but resulted in making his further stay at Falmouth perilous in the extreme. And 28 if this were not enough, next day, while hanging over the side, painting the hall, in trepidation of a visit from the castle soldiers, rumor came to the ship that the man-of-war in the haven parposed impressing one-third of the letter of marque's crew; though, indeed, the latter vessel was preparing for a second cruise. Being on board a private armed ship, Israel had little dreamed of its liability to the same governmental hardships with the meanest merchantman. But the system of impressment is no respecter either of pity or person.

His mind was soon determined. Unike his shipmates, braving immediate and lonely hazard, rather than wait for a collective and ultimate one, he cunLingly dropped himself overboard the same night, and after the narrowest risk from the muskets of the man-of-war's sentries (whose gangways be had to pass), succeeded in swimming to shore, where he fell exhausted, but recovering, Zed inland; doubly hunted by the thought, that whether as an Englishman, or whether as an American, he would, if caught, be now equally subject to enslavement.

Shortly after the break of day, having gained many miles, he succeeded in ricding himself of his seaman's clothing, having found some mouldy old rags

on the banks of a stagnant pond, nigh a rickety building, which looked like a poorhouse,--clothing not improbably, as he surmised, left there, on the bank, by some pauper suicide. Marvel not that he should, with avidity, seize these rags; what the suicides abandon the living hug.

Önce more in beggar's garb, the fugitive sped towards London, prompted by the same instinct which impels the hunted fox to the wilderness; for solitudes befriend the endangered wild beast, but crowds are the security, because the true desert of persecuted man. Among the things of the capital, Israel for more than forty years was yet to disappear, as one entering at dusk into a thick wood. Nor did ever the German forest, nor Tasso's enchanted one, contain in its depths more things of horror than eventually were revealed in the secret clefts, gulfs, caves and dens of London. But here we anticipate a page.

CHAPTER XXIII.

ISRAEL IN EGYPT

It was a grey, lowering afternoon that, worn-out, half-starved, and haggard, Israel arrived within some ten or fifteen miles of London, and saw scores and scores of forlorn men engaged in a great brick-yard.

For the most part, brick-making is all mud and mire. Where, abroad, the business is carried on largely, as to supply the London Market, hordes of the poorest wretches are employed; their grimy tatters naturally adapting them to an employ where cleanliness is as much out of the question as with a drowned man at the bottom of the lake in the Dismal Swamp.

Desperate with want, Israel resolved to turn brick-maker; nor did he fear to present himself as a stranger; nothing doubting that to such a vocation, his rags would be accounted the best lettersof-introduction.

To be brief, he accosted one of the many surly overseers, or task-masters of the yard, who with no few pompous airs, finally engaged him at six shillings a week; almost equivalent to a dollar and a half. He was appointed to one of the mills for grinding up the ingredients. This mill stood in the open air. It was of a rude, primitive, Eastern aspect; consisting of a sort of hopper, emptying into

a barrel-shaped receptacle. In the barrel was a clumsy machine turned round at its axis by a great bent beam, like a well-sweep, only it was horizontal; to this beam, at its outer end, a spavined old horse was attached. The muddy mixture was shovelled into the hopper by spavined-looking old men; while trudging wearily round and round the spavined old horse ground it all up till it slowly squashed out at the bottom of the barrel, in a doughy_compound, all ready for the moulds. Where

the dough squeezed out of the barrel, a pit was sunken, so as to bring the moulder here stationed down to a level with the trough, into which the dough fell. Israel was assigned to this pit. Men came to him continually, reaching down rude wooden trays, divided into compartments, each of the size and shape of a brick. With a flat sort of big ladle, Israel slapped the dough into the trays from the trough; then, with a bit of smooth board scraped the top even, and handed it up. Half buried there in the pit, all the time handing those desolate trays, poor Israel seemed some gravedigger, or church-yard man, tucking away dead little innocents in their coffins on one side, and cunningly disintering them again to resurrectionists stationed on the other.

Twenty of these melancholy old mills were in operation. Twenty heart-broken old horses, rigged out deplorably in castoff old cart harness, incessantly tugged at twenty great shaggy beams; while from twenty half-burst old barrels, twenty wads of mud, with a lava-like course, gouged out into twenty old troughs, to be slapped by twenty tattered men, into the twenty-times-twenty battered old trays.

Ere entering his pit for the first, Israel had been struck by the dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders. But hardly had he himself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of concern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of half jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed was, that this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder; who, by heedlessly slapping

that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness, his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration. To these muddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay. What signifies who we be-dukes or ditchers? thought the moulders; all is vanity and clay. So slap, slap, slap; care-free and negligent; with bitter unconcern, these dismal desperadoes flapped down the dough. If this recklessness were vicious of them, be it so; but their vice was like that weed which but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.

For thirteen weary weeks, lorded over by the taskmasters, Israel toiled in his pit. Though this condemned him to a sort of earthy dungeon, or grave-digger's hole while he worked; yet even when liberated to his meals, naught of a cheery nature greeted him. The yard was encamped, with all its endless rows of tented sheds, and kilns, and mills, upon a wild waste moor, belted round by bogs and fens. The blank horizon, like a rope, coiled round the whole.

Sometimes the air was harsh and bleak; the ridged and mottled sky looked scourged; or cramping fogs set in from sea, for leagues around, ferreting out each rheumatic human bone, and racking it; the sciatic limpers shivered; their aguish rags sponged up the mists. No shelter, though it hailed. The sheds were for the bricks. Unless, indeed, according to the phrase, each man was a "brick," which, in sober scripture, was the case; brick is no bad name for any son of Adam; Eden was but a brickyard; what is a mortal but a few luckless shovelfuls of clay, moulded in a mould, laid out on a sheet to dry, and ere long quickened into his queer caprices by the sun? Are not men built into communities just like bricks into a wall? Consider the great wall of China: ponder the great populace of Pekin. As man serves bricks, so God him; building him up by billions into the edifices of his purposes. Man attains not to the nobility of a brick, unless taken in the aggregate. Yet is there a difference in brick, whether quick or dead; which, for the last, we now shall see.

To be concluded in our next.)

THE OLD WOMAN WHO DRIED UP AND BLEW AWAY.

"There be many witches at this day in Lapland who sell winds to mariners, and they must needs go whom the devil drives."—Fuller's Holy and Profane State.

"Old woman, old woman, whither so high?"
"To sweep the cobwebs from the sky."

MANY years ago, on the old stage

road leading from Boston to Plymouth, just out of Weymouth into Hingha, there lived an old woman who went by the name of Sue Ward.

Where she came from no one knew. Some years before the time of which we write, she had taken up her abode in an old house which had been deserted by its former owner, and there she dweltall alone, a perfect mystery to the gossips of the neighborhood. She managed to get a living by doing all sorts of odd jobs for the people of the village; by kuitting now and then a pair of stockings; by spinning a few knots of yarn, or going out as nurse for the sick. The villagers also, at first, were quite kind to her. But after a while they began to weary of being benevolent to so mysterious a being. All plotting and questioning to ascertain her former life failed to produce any effect, save a stubborn refusal to gratify curiosity, and slight flashes of anger, which all inquirers agreed boded no good.

Although the time of which we write was after the excitement concerning the Salem witches, yet belief in such beings had not wholly died away, especially among the older portion of the community. Could they not quote the Bible and the godly Mr. Mather in support of their doctrine?

By-and-by strange stories began to be circulated concerning old Sue Ward. It was said, that being vexed by Deacon Burr, she gave utterance to a muttered curse, and the next morning the deacon's best heifer was found dead, in such a strange position, that nobody but the devil could have brought her there. Then, as Mistress Ward was walking home one cold night, uncle Joshua overtook her in his nice new wagon. She asked him to carry her home, as she was tired. But he replied he could not, as it was rather off his road, and he was in a hurry."May you be longer reaching home than I am," exclaimed she, and but a moment afterwards his horse fell, broke both shafts to the wagon, and what was worse, his own leg.

These stories, somewhat magnified,

perhaps, in the telling, were soon in the mouth of every one in the village. Soon they spoke of her no longer as Mistress Ward, or old Sue Ward. She possessed the three great requisites for a witch of that time.

I. She was old.
II. She was ugly.

III. She was poor.

With such an evil suspicion hanging about her, it is no wonder that many who had formerly befriended, now avoided her. Even the little children, having heard the mysterious talk of their parents, as they passed her in the streets, clasped one another's hands more tightly, and, gazing at her with halffrightened looks, went hurriedly on, though some of the larger boys would sometimes shout after her.

But

Matters were thus, as one wild windy November night, old Sue sat by her fire in her lonely hut. She had been out to gather the faggots of which the fire was built, and meeting some rude boys on her return, they had taunted her with unseemly words. Not often would such words have affected her so much. as the screaming wind howled through the branches of the forest, and she heard the moanings of the dying autumn, thinking all the while that she knew not where to look for help through the coming winter, what wonder that she felt like cursing the day in which she was born?

She did curse it most bitterly. Her wicked, withered old heart was lifting itself up in blasphemy, as she sat by her fire that night, and gazed intently into its flames as they lightened up her miserable room.

"Why can't I die?" muttered she to herself. "As if seventy years of sorrow, seventy years of sin, wasn't enough for one mortal! Doesn't the Bible say that three score years and ten are the limits of life? Why should I live longer? I, without friends, with none of the comforts which belong to age, old, poor, miserable, half-starved and cold?" and she drew up closer to the fire, and continued.

"I would drown myself, but the water

is so cold. I have not strength enough to kill myself any other way. Why is there no other way but dying to be rid of the world? If folks could cast off life as they do an old garment! I've heard of old women that dried up and blew away. The Lord knows I'm dry enough. Why, if he will not let me die, will he not blow me away? I should not care if it was to a place warmer than this, where old women don't have to go out after faggots." And she grinned a most wicked grin, showing one worn yellow stump of a tooth.

"Good evening, Mother Ward," said a voice at her elbow.

She turned and saw just at her side à little old man dressed in black. A quick active old fellow he seemed, as, without being asked, he drew the other of the two rush-bottomed chairs-all the seats the room contained-up to the fire.

"Who are you? What do you want?" asked old Sue, as soon as she had a little recovered from her astonishment at this sudden interruption.

"A poor cold traveller who wishes to warm himself at your fire," replied he, just glancing at her with his keen black eye. Oh it was the wickedest eye you ever saw, so full of malice and deviltry, so glittering and snake-like.

"You are welcome to the little warmth a wretched old woman's fire can give. But you have not told me your name, though I ought to know it, as you seem to know mine."

"I go under different names," replied he; "those most familiar with me, call me by a nickname, but my proper title is Beel Z. Bubb. But why do you call yourself wretched?"

"Have you not lived long enough in the world to know?" replied she almost fiercely. "There are grey hairs on your brow, and the wrinkles on your face will number almost as many as mine. Is it not always wretched to be old? But perhaps you have warm friends who cheer you with their presence, and sustain you by their love?"

She paused a moment, as if waiting for a reply. But the old man sat with his elbows resting on his knees, looking steadfastly into the fire with his cunning eyes. The old woman continued

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Perhaps you do not know what it is to outlive all the friends of your youth, to wander away among strangers, and to be shunned and despised by them, to be treated and hooted at as a witch, as one who has dealings with the devil, when

I know no more of the devil than you do."

"Not perhaps as much," said he, in an undertone. "She went on, not hearing or not heeding him.

"You may not have felt all the wickedness of your soul rise up against your persecutors, prompting you to curse them as I have cursed them time and again, and curse them now. Oh, the good Christian souls! who pretend to be so pious and holy, who roll up their eyes at the very sight of me! I should not wonder if some of them had more dealings with Satan than myself."

"No doubt of it," rejoined the old man. Old Sue went on, feeling a strange thrilling pleasure in telling her wicked thoughts to the one at her side, whose eyes gleamed brighter, and looked more evil, the more wicked she grew.

"And I was thinking what a mockery it would be for me to say the Lord's Prayer. 'Our Father' ".

The old man gave an uneasy start as she said these words, yet remained quiet, as she repeated no more; but, smiting her skinny hands together, exclaimed

"Why should I call him my Father? Has he treated me as a child? Has he not left me here in my old age, to rags, and poverty, and abuse, when he might have taken me to his blessed home beyond the skies long before this? Death would long ago have been welcome to me."

"Why do you not kill yourself, then ?" asked the old man softly.

"I was thinking of that just as you came in. But it is an ugly, horrible business to take one's own life. If there were only some easier way to rid one's self of the world! Did you ever hear," continued she, speaking in a low, confidential tone, "did ever you hear of any old women that dried up and blew away?"

The cunning-eyed one for a while spoke not a word. He sat there still and quiet, looking fixedly into the fire. But all at once he burst out with a wild stave of a song. The words so wrought upon the imagination of mother Ward, that— she knew not why-she began to stamp her feet in accompaniment, and when he came to the chorus, she joined her shrill treble to his cracked bass, and the strange melody rang out clear and piercingly:

I walked me out the other night,
The wind was blowing high;

I clasped my cloak about me tight,
And wished that I might die.

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