whisper from the prisoner. So
brilliantly did these reports visualize his daily life that the crowds
who read them could hear the clanking of the chains as he walked and the
groans that came from his wounded body.

Thousands of letters began to pour into the office of the Governor of
Virginia, threatening, imploring, pleading for his life. The leading
politicians of all parties of the North were at length swept into this
howling mob by the press. To every plea the Governor of the Commonwealth
replied:

"Southern Society is built on Reverence for Law. The Law has been
outraged by this man. It shall be vindicated, though the heavens fall."

In this stand he was immovable and the South backed him to a man. For
exciting servile insurrection the King of Great Britain was held up
to everlasting scorn by our fathers who wrote the Declaration of
Independence. For this crime among others we rebelled and established
the American Republic. Should John Brown be canonized for the same
infamy? The Southern people asked this question in dumb amazement at the
clamor from the North.

And so the Day of Transfiguration on the scaffold dawned.

Judge Thomas Russell and his good wife journeyed all the way from Boston
to minister to the wants of their strange guest. There was in the
distinguished jurist's mind a question which he must ask Brown before
the rope should strangle him forever. His martyrdom had cleared every
doubt and cloud from the mind of his friend save one. His fascinating
letters, filled with the praise of God and the glory of a martyr's
cause, had exalted him.

The judge had heard his speech in court on the day he was sentenced to
death and had believed that each word was inspired. But the old man, who
was now to die in glory, had spent a week in Judge Russell's house in
Boston hiding from a deputy sheriff in whose hands was a warrant for
plain murder--one of the foulest murders in the records of crime. The
judge was a student of character, as well as Abolitionist.

He asked Brown for his last confidential statement as to these crimes on
the Pottawattomie. There was no hesitation in his bold reply. Standing
beneath the shadow of the gallows, the white hand of Death on his
stooped shoulders, one foot on earth and the other pressing the shores
of eternity, he lied as brazenly as he had lied a hundred times before.
He assured his friend and his wife that he had nothing to do with those
killings.

Mrs. Russell, weepin