ght to look at Van Dorn, nor ask what had become of him, and
his friend Sorden removed his body, unseen, to a spot in the pine woods,
where his unmarked grave was dug, and standing round it were three
mourners only, and Sorden said the final words with homely tears:

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The Maryland constable marched Patty Cannon down to the little bridge of
planks where ran the ditch nearly on the State line, and tradition still
believes the figment that Joe Johnson at that moment was hiding beneath
it.

There, driven across the boundary like some borderer's cow, the queen of
the kidnappers was seized by the Delaware constable, and placed in a
small country gig-wagon, and, followed by a large mounted posse, the
road was taken to the little hamlet of Seaford, five miles distant.

She watched the small funereal cedars and monumental poplar-trees rise
strangled from the underbrush, the dark-brown streams flowing into inky
mill-ponds, the close, small pines, scarcely large enough to moan, but
trying to do so in a baby tone, and her eyes turned to the sand, where
she was soon to be. Not agony nor repentance nor any hope of escape
fluttered her cold heart, but only a feeling of being ungratefully
deserted by her friends, and ill-treated by her equals and neighbors,
who had so seldom warned or avoided her; no preacher had come to tell
her the naked gospel, and some had bowed to her respectfully, and even
begged her oats, and made subscriptions from her ill-gotten silver.

Seaford was a sandy place upon a bluff of the Nanticoke, and, as the
procession came in, a party of surveyors, working for Meshach Milburn's
railroad, paused to jeer the old kidnapper. She had grown suddenly old,
and never raised her voice, that had always been so forward, to make a
reply.

The magistrate, Dr. John Gibbons, had been an educated young Irishman
who landed from a ship at Lewes, and, marrying a lady in Maryland, near
Patty Cannon's, became the legal spirit of the little town. His office,
a mere cabin, on a corner by his house, being too small for the purpose,
the examination was adjourned to the tavern, at the foot of the hill,
near where a mill-pond brook dug its way to the Nanticoke. Around the
tavern some box-bush walks were made in the sand, and willow-trees
bordered the cold river-side, and, at pauses in the hearing, wild-fowl
were heard to play and pipe in the falling tide.

The evidence of Cy James and other cow