nterest of
patriotism, that any pretended _private_ revelation must necessarily
have become a farce. No one, especially, would have held any such secret
for months, and then divulged it in the ambiguous mode of a romance,
while arbitrary arrests and unexplained imprisonments were making the
once free States of the Old Union a second Venice. Suspicious
circumstances have been observed, and suspicious persons put under
watch; but if anything more than mere suspicion has been reached, the
disloyal persons themselves, and the government, are the only parties
who possess the information.

All this, to say that the materials for this narration have not been
gathered from disloyal sources or found in disloyal company, and that,
as a consequence, it does not enter within doors closed to true men, by
any magic key of the mind or the imagination. And if any mystery
suggested, from that cause remains even partially unsolved, truth and
loyalty, and not a desire for mystification, must supply the
explanation.

And now to detail, very briefly, what is further known of the house on
East 5-- Street, and its occupation.

It has already been related that Superintendent Kennedy, in spite of his
slighting replies to the two young men, did not really undervalue their
information, and that two vigilant detectives, with assistants, were
entrusted with the duty of watching the two houses. "L---- and another
good man" had been ordered to take charge of the house on East
5--Street, and they entered upon their duties at once. Not as ordinary
policemen, of course, for such a plan would necessarily have defeated
any chance of successful observation. It was as a very modest private
gentleman, elderly, with a cane and a slight limp, that L---- managed to
lounge by the house repeatedly within the space of an hour; while his
assistant, dressed in the clothes of a glass-mender, and with a box of
the proper cut strapped on his back, haunted that street and invited
business with a cry which the boys irreverently designated "glass
pudding!" During the two hours thus spent, no person entered or left the
house, nor was there a sign of life at any of the windows,--though what
eyes may really have been watching from those closed blinds, it is quite
impossible to say. Enough that they kept their watch closely until the
coming on of the same heavy thunder-storm which burst upon the visitors
to the sorceress in Prince Street; and that when the first drops of t