a--murderer's--with a traitor's."

"Ah, my friend, when hate draws your portrait it is bound to be black.
When prejudice holds the pen, your virtues stand in the shade of vice. I
will tell John Sprague's story from the day he quit Acredale to the
unhappy hour his comrade was killed in the dark, in the sleeping-room of
the mother and daughter who had nursed him from the very jaws of death.
He was in that house by his father's urgent request, though it would
have needed none to open its doors to any one in want of succor. Nor,"
he added, significantly, "can it be told who killed Wesley Boone until
all the shots fired in Mrs. Atterbury's chamber are accounted for."

Then he narrated rapidly, but tellingly, the substance of what has been
already set down in this history--the facts taken from Jack's letters
and attested by the corroboration of Barney, Dick, and the company's
officers. There was a visible revulsion in the larger part of the
audience as the tale went on; and when the lawyer wound up with the
story of Mrs. Sprague's baffled efforts in Washington to have her boy
brought North, there was an outburst of applause and a faint cheer from
the younger men for "glorious old Jack."

The factions shifted a good deal after this official rendering of the
affair. There was no longer any talk of burning the Sprague property,
and opinion was about evenly divided as to Jack's conduct. December had
come, and the township was busy packing boxes to send to the army. No
news had come North from Richmond. Active movements were looked for
every day, and in the momentous expectation such lesser incidents as
exchange were forgotten or ignored. The daily journals were filled with
details of contemplated expeditions, and one morning Mrs. Sprague read
with beating heart this paragraph in the _Herald_:

"A score or more of the men who escaped from the Richmond prison a few
weeks ago, arrived at Washington to-day from Fort Monroe. The party
endured untold privations in the swamps between Williamsburg and our
line on the Warwick, but all came in safely, except two men who died
from the results of their wounds. The expedition was planned and carried
out by an agent of General Butler, who has been in Virginia since the
unfortunate attempt to rescue Captain Boone of the 'Caribee' regiment.
At the moment the party reached the Union outpost, one of the most
daring of the Union men, Sergeant Jacques of the Caribees, was, it is
thought, mortall