met with its end here as it must everywhere. We shall have no more
experiments for liberty out of the Union, if the new Union will grant
all that it gave before. Yesterday, when our splendid levies were
paraded in the street, with foot, cavalry, and cannon, in admirable
order, and kindly-eyed men in command, I looked across their cleanly
lines, tipped with bayonets, to the Capitol they had won, bearing at
last the tri-color we all love and honor, as the symbol of our homes and
the hope of the world, and thought how more grandly, even in her ruin,
Richmond stood in the light of its crowding stars, rather than the den
of a desperate cabal, whose banner was known in no city nor sea, but as
the ensign of corsairs, and hailed only by fustian peers, now rent in
the grip of our eagle, and without a fane or an abiding-place. Let us go
on, not conquerors, but Republicans, battering down only to rebuild more
gloriously,--not narrowing the path of any man, but opening to high and
low a broader destiny and a purer patriotism.

CHAPTER XXXII.

WAR EXECUTIONS.

To have looked upon seventeen beings of human organism, ambition, sense
of pain and of disgrace, brought forward with all the solemnities of a
living funeral, and launched from absolute cognition to direct death,
should put one in the category of Calcraft, Ketch, and Isaacs.

Yet, I do not think it would be right to so classify me. I know an
excellent clergyman, who has seen and assisted in fifty odd executions.
He says, as I say, that each new one is an augmented terror. But he is
upon the spot to smooth the felon's troubled spirit, and I am with him
to teach the felon's boon companions the direness of the penalty.
Without either the Chaplain or myself, capital punishment would lose
half its effectiveness.

And this is why I write the present article,--to relieve myself from the
pertinacious inquiries with which I have been assailed since my return
from the melancholy episodes of the executions at Washington. I am
button-holed at every corner, and put through a cross-examination, to
which Holt's or Bingham's had no searchingness: "How did Mrs. Suratt
die?" "Was the rope attached to her left ear?" "What sort of rope was
it, for example?" "Do her pictures look like her?" "Pray describe how
Payne twisted, and whether you think Atzeroth's neck was dislocated?"

And, after answering these questions, replete as they are with horrible
curiosity, the questioner turns