laims the _habeas corpus_ is never
suspended. A tall, lank-haired man, looking more like an undertaker than
a divine of any denomination, read straight through, without a syllable
of preface, the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the
Corinthians, and then, kneeling down, began a rambling, extemporaneous
prayer, the main object of which seemed to be, to address the Deity by
as many periphrastic adjurations as possible. The orator besought "that
these melancholy circumstances might be blessed to us, the survivors;"
and rehearsed several platitudes on the uncertainty of life; but, from
first to last, there was not one single word of intercession or
commendation on behalf of the dead man's soul. I was glad when it was
over; our own simple service, read by the merest layman, would surely
have been a more fitting obsequy.

What followed was startling enough from its very suddenness. One of the
assistants stepped forward, and, with a quick, careless motion, threw
back two folding shutters, that formed the upper part of the coffin lid;
the blaze of the vertical sun, on which no living thing could have
looked unblinded, fell full on the heavy eyelids, that never shrunk or
shivered, and on the bare, upturned features, blanched to the unnatural
whiteness only found in corpses from which the life-blood has been
drained away. Since then, I have tried to recall the face as I saw it
often--round and ruddy, beaming with reckless joviality, and grotesque
humor: it will only rise as I saw it once--white, and solemn, and still.
When the crowd had satisfied their curiosity, the coffin was borne away,
and everything fell back into the old groove of monotony.

It will hardly be believed, that, though the victim had communicated
more than once with the British Legation (an envelope franked by Lord
Lyons was among the papers I examined), the Federal authorities did not
deem it necessary to give any official notice of the slaughter. Percy
Anderson was absolutely ignorant of what had happened, when he came to
me on the following day. The fact, too, is significant, that the
Washington journals, for whose net no incident is generally too small,
made no allusion to the tragedy, till the Thursday morning; I presume
silence was considered useless, when a member of our Legation must have
been made acquainted with the details.

The regrets of those who may have been interested in poor John
Hardcastle's life and death, will scarcely be lessene