akes and cider, also the women
and children, and made a picnic of the matter. It was the largest crowd
the village had ever seen. The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought
up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the memorable
event.

Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations. Within one week
afterward four young lightweights in the village proclaimed themselves
abolitionists! In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert;
everybody laughed at him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy. The four
swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their faces,
and hinted darkly at awful possibilities. The people were troubled
and afraid, and showed it. And they were stunned, too; they could
not understand it. "Abolitionist" had always been a term of shame and
horror; yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed to
bear that name, but were grimly proud of it. Respectable young men they
were, too--of good families, and brought up in the church. Ed Smith, the
printer's apprentice, nineteen, had been the head Sunday-school boy,
and had once recited three thousand Bible verses without making a break.
Dick Savage, twenty, the baker's apprentice; Will Joyce,
twenty-two, journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four,
tobacco-stemmer--were the other three. They were all of a sentimental
cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as
it was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been
suspected of having anything bad in them.

They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and
dreadful. They presently achieved the distinction of being denounced by
names from the pulpit--which made an immense stir! This was grandeur,
this was fame. They were envied by all the other young fellows now. This
was natural. Their company grew--grew alarmingly. They took a name. It
was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were
simply the abolitionists. They had pass-words, grips, and signs; they
had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy pomps
and ceremonies, at midnight.

They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little while
they moved through the principal street in procession--at midnight,
black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum--on
pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went through with some
majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers. T