man should live or die. The move had hastened the day
when the Government was to begin its cannonade.

Lewis was yet in Williamsburgh. Had he been present in this hail,
watching events with his fellow lawyers, fellow politicians, fellow
countrymen, who knew nothing of one snowy night a year ago last
February, his wife, for both their sakes, would have remained away. As
it was, she had been persuaded. Unity would not for much have missed the
spectacle, friends had been pressing, and at last her own painful
interest prevailed. She was here now, and she sat as in a waking dream,
her hands idle, her eyes, wide and dark, steadily fixed upon the scene
below. She saw, leaning against a window, Ludwell Cary, and, the centre
of a cluster of men in hunting-shirts, Adam Gaudylock.

The Capitol clock struck twelve. As the last stroke died upon the
feverish air, the Chief Justice entered the Hall and took the Speaker's
chair. Beside him was Cyrus Griffin, the District Judge. Hay, the
District Attorney, with his associates William Wirt and Alexander McRae,
now appeared, and immediately afterward the imposing array of the
prisoner's counsel, a phalanx which included no less than four sometime
Attorneys-General and two subalterns of note. These took the seats
reserved for them; the marshal and his deputies pressed the people back,
and the jury entered and filled the jury box. Below and near them sat a
medley of witnesses--important folk, and folk whom only this trial made
important.

A loud murmur was now heard from without; the marshal's men, red and
perspiring, cleared a thread-like path, and the prisoner, accompanied by
his son-in-law, entered the Hall. He was dressed in black, with
carefully powdered hair. Quiet, cool, smiling, and collected, he was
brought to the bar, when, having taken his place, bowed to the judges,
and greeted his counsel, he turned slightly and surveyed with his
composed face and his extremely keen black eyes the throng that with
intentness looked on him in turn. It was by no means their first
encounter of eyes. The preliminaries of that famous trial had been many
and prolonged. From the prisoner's arrival in April under military
escort to the present moment, through the first arraignment at that bar,
the assembling of the Grand Jury, the tedious waiting for Wilkinson's
long-deferred arrival from New Orleans, the matter of the subpoena to
the President with which the country rang, the adjournment from June