chmond Grays lying around the
floor in picturesque and (then) novel pursuit of soft planks, a motley
audience was gathered together to hear the papers captured at John
Brown's house--the Kennedy farm on Maryland Heights--read out with the
Governor's running comments. The purpose of all this was plain enough.
It was meant to serve as proof of a knowledge and instigation of the
raid by prominent persons and party-leaders in the North. The most
innocent notes and letters, commonplace newspaper-paragraphs and printed
cuttings, were distorted and twisted by the reading and by the talking
into clear instructions and positive plots. However, the main impression
was of the picturesqueness of the soldiers resting on their knapsacks,
and their arms stacked in the dark corners,--of the Governor and his
satellites, some of them in brilliant militia array, seated around the
lighted table,--and of the grotesque eloquence with which either the
Governor or some of his prominent people would now and then burst out
into an oratorical tirade, all thrown away on his sleepy auditors, and
lost to the world for want of some clever shorthand writer.

In the morning I was glad to hear that my belated train had spent the
last forty-eight hours at Martinsburg, and I did not a bit regret that
my two days had been so full of adventure and incident. Waiting for its
coming, I walked once more through the village, with one of the watchmen
of the armory, who had been captured by John Brown and spent the night
with him in the engine-house, and heard in all its freshness the story
now so well known. Then I bade Governor Wise good-bye, and was duly
thanked for my valiant services to the noble Mother of States, and
rewarded by being offered the honorary and honorable title of A.D.C. to
the commander-in-chief of Virginia, both for past services and for the
future tasks to be met, of beating off invading hosts from the
North,--all in the Governor's eye. Luckily for both sides, I declined
the handsome offer; for my next visit to Virginia was as an A.D.C. to a
general commanding troops, not of the North, but of the United States,
invading, not the Virginia of John Brown's time, but the Virginia of a
wicked Southern Confederacy.

Not long after, I received a letter of thanks from Governor Wise,
written at Richmond and with a good deal of official flattery. His son
Jennings, an old acquaintance of mine in pleasant days in Germany, came
to see me, too, with civi