on the piazza. The mention of a certain name arrested her
attention. She listened: what they said terrified her. Penn Hapgood had
been apprehended during the night, and his trial by drum-head
court-martial was at that moment proceeding.

"Mr. Pepperill!" she called, in a scarcely audible whisper; and, looking
around, Daniel saw her alarmed face at the window.

Daniel was one of the soldiers who had been detailed to guard the house.
Strongly against his will, he had been compelled to enlist, in order to
avoid the persecutions of his secession neighbors. Such was already
becoming the fate of many whose hearts were not in the cause, whose
sympathies were all with the government against which they were forced
to rebel.

"What, marm?" said Pepperill, meekly.

"Is it true what that man is saying?"

"About the schoolmaster? I--I'm afeard it ar true! They've cotched him,
marm, and there's men that's swore the death of him, marm."

Virginia flew to inform her father. The old man rose up instantly,
forgetting his blindness, forgetting his own feebleness, and the danger
into which he would have rushed, to go and plead Penn's cause.

Fortunately, perhaps, for him, the guard crossed their muskets before
him, refusing to let him pass. Their orders were, not only to defend the
house, but also to prevent his leaving it.

"Then I will go alone!" said Carl, who was to have been his guide. And
scarcely waiting to receive instructions from Virginia and her father,
he ran out, slipping between the soldiers, who had no orders to detain
any person but the minister, and ran to the Academy.

The mockery of a trial was over. The prisoner had been condemned. The
penalty pronounced against him was death. Already the noose was dangling
from a tree, and some soldiers were bringing from the school-house a
table to serve as a scaffold. Silas Ropes, who had a feather stuck in
his cap, and wore an old rusty scabbard at his side, and flourished a
sword, enjoying the title of "lieutenant," obtained for him through
Bythewood's influence; Lysander Sprowl, who had been honored with a
captaincy from the same source, and who, though a forger, and late a
fugitive from justice, now boldly defied the power of the civil
authorities to arrest him, trusting to that atrocious policy of the
confederate government which virtually proclaimed to the robber and
murderer, "Become, now, a traitor to your country, and all other crimes
shall be forgiven you;"--thes