e to be asked, and provide simple and
satisfactory answers to them; and the matter is still a mystery.

Well, Cephas was not a hero when he started, and if the truth is to be
told, he developed none of the symptoms until he had returned home
safely, accompanied by Mr. Sanders. Then he became the lion of the
village, and was sought after by old and young. All wanted to hear the
story of his wonderful adventures. He speedily became a celebrated
Cephas, and when he found that he was really regarded as a hero by his
schoolmates, and by some of the young women, he was quick to appropriate
the character. He became reticent; he went about with a sort of weary
and travel-worn look, as if he had seen everything that was worth
seeing, and heard everything that was worth hearing.

Now, what Cephas had seen and heard was bad enough. He could hardly be
brought to believe that the haggard and wild-eyed young fellow who
answered to Gabriel's name at the fort was the Gabriel that he had
known, and when he made up his mind that it really was Gabriel, he
couldn't hold the tears back. "Brace up, old man," said Gabriel. It was
then in a choking voice that Cephas delivered Mr. Sanders's message,
using the dog-latin which they both knew so well. And in that tongue
Gabriel told Cephas of the tortures to which he and his fellow-prisoners
had been subjected, of the horrors of the sweat-boxes, and the terrors
of the wrist-rack. So effective was the narrative that Gabriel rattled
off in the school tongue, that when he was ordered back to his solitary
cell, Cephas turned away weeping. He was no hero then; he was simply a
small boy with a tender heart.

There were grave faces at Shady Dale when Cephas told what he had seen
and heard. Major Tomlin Perdue, of Halcyondale, became almost savage
when he heard of the indignities to which the unfortunate young men had
been subjected. He wrote a card and published it in the _Malvern
Recorder_, and the card was so much to the purpose, and created such
indignation in the State, that the authorities at Washington took
cognisance thereof, and issued orders that there was to be no more
torture of the prisoners. This fact, however, was not known until months
afterward, and, meanwhile, the newspapers of Georgia were giving a wide
publicity to the cruelties which had been practised on the young men,
and radicalism became the synonym of everything that was loathsome and
detestable. Reprisals were made in all part