it was by the merest accident that Miss Wetherell's connection with
this Jethro Bass was brought to my notice.

"Sincerely yours,

"ALEXANDER DUNCAN."

It is pleasant to know that there were people in the world who could snub
Miss Sadler; and there could be no doubt, from the manner in which she
laid the letter down and took up the clippings, that Miss Sadler felt
snubbed: equally, there could be no doubt that the revenge would fall on
other shoulders than Mr. Duncan's. And when Miss Sadler proceeded to read
the clippings, her hair would have stood on end with horror had it not
been so efficiently plastered down. Miss Sadler seized her pen, and began
a letter to Mrs. Merrill. Miss Sadler's knowledge of the
proprieties--together with other qualifications--had made her school what
it was. No Cynthia Wetherells had ever before entered its sacred portals,
or should again.

The first of these clippings was the article containing the arraignment
of Jethro Bass which Mr. Merrill had shown to his wife, and which had
been the excuse for Miss Penniman's call. The second was one which Mr.
Duncan had clipped from the Newcastle Guardian of the day before, and
gave, from Mr. Worthington's side, a very graphic account of the conflict
which was to tear the state asunder. The railroads were tired of paying
toll to the chief of a band of thieves and cutthroats, to a man who had
long throttled the state which had nourished him, to--in short,--to
Jethro Bass. Miss Sadler was not much interested in the figures and
metaphors of political compositions. Right had found a champion--the
article continued--in Mr. Isaac D. Worthington of Brampton, president of
the Truro Road and owner of large holdings elsewhere. Mr. Worthington,
backed by other respectable property interests, would fight this monster
of iniquity to the death, and release the state from his thraldom. Jethro
Bass, the article alleged, was already about his abominable work--had
long been so--as in mockery of that very vigilance which is said to be
the price of liberty. His agents were busy in every town of the state,
seeing to it that the slaves of Jethro Bass should be sent to the next
legislature.

And what was this system which he had built up among these rural
communities? It might aptly be called the System of Mortgages. The
mortgage--dread name for a dreadful thing--was the chief weapon of the
monster. Even as Jethro Bass held the mortgages of Coniston and Tarl