Clayton yer."

Before the Judge could reply, Clayton exclaimed,

"Now, Brother Custis, permit me now! Let my noble old constituent and
fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"

"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man
surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were
marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the
road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord
rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John
Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little
brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House--where I
am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes
the name among them of 'Kind Parke'--I found several of our free
Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William
Parke, contrary to law, has been selling thee brandy out of an eggshell,
as if he knew not the contents, I shall pay him to repeat the vile
enticement quickly, for ye who are of the world must fight this night.'"

"Goy!" said Clayton, warming up; "Quakers will set other people on,
won't they? Goy!"

"Other gunpowder arms were there procured, and we barricaded Cowgill
House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise
war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns,
and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical
defensive position--is that the vain term?--to send a volley out the
main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of
Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the
staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a
festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's
permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was
designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend
Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the
feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the
stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro
spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of
the black boys gagged him. Then the attack was made, and, at my order,
all the lights were put out."

"Oh, Jedge," Levin Dennis broke in, "it was short and dreadful! Captain
Van Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the nigge