erances show that he was willing to give up his life and those of his
sons and other followers, if by such action he could merely draw
attention to the cause which had taken possession of his soul. In the
course of the fighting he saw his two sons mortally wounded, and was
himself stabbed and cut. Throughout the fight and his subsequent trial
at Charles Town he remained imperturbable; when taken to the gallows he
sat upon his coffin, in a wagon, and he not only mounted the scaffold
without a tremor, but actually stood there, apparently unmoved, for ten
or fifteen minutes, with the noose around his neck, while the troops
which had formed his escort were marched to their positions.

A large number of troops were present at the execution, for it was then
believed in the South that the Brown raid was not the mere suicidal
stroke of an individual fanatic, but an organized movement on the part
of the Republican party; an effort to rescue Brown was therefore
apprehended. This idea was later shown to be a fallacy, Brown having
made his own plans, and been financed by a few northern friends, headed
by Gerrit Smith of New York.

There has been a tendency in the North to make a saint of John Brown,
and in the South to make a devil of him. As a matter of fact he was a
poor, misguided zealot, with a wild light in his eye, who had set out to
do a frightful thing; for, bad though slavery was, its evils were not
comparable with the horrors which would have resulted from a slave
rebellion.

It must be conceded, however, that those who would canonize John Brown
have upon their side a strange and impressive piece of evidence. The
jail where he was lodged in Charles Town and the courthouse where he was
tried, still stand, and it is the actual fact that, when the snow falls,
it always miraculously melts in a path which leads diagonally across the
street from the one to the other. That this is true I have unimpeachable
testimony. _Snow will not stand on the path by which John Brown crossed
back and forth from the jail to the court-house._ There will be snow
over all the rest of the street, but not on that path; there you can see
it melting.

But, as with certain other "miracles," this one is not so difficult to
understand if you know how it is brought about. The courthouse is heated
from the jail, and the hot pipes run under the pavement.

CHAPTER XI

THE VIRGINIAS AND THE WASHINGTONS

In colonial times, and long thereafter,