risoners, in both cases, have deserved more than all the
punishment received; but the blind uncertainty as to their guilt, and
the impossibility of discovering even the nature of the charges against
them, have made those imprisonments equally indefensible and dangerous,
and brought them at last to their end.

There is a woman at the bottom of almost every revolution--political as
well as social. Tradition tells us, though history is silent on the
subject, that the sad fate of the daughter of a French citizen, flung
into the Bastille for alleged complicity in a conspiracy during the
early days of Louis XVI., and dying there--rankled in the minds of the
Parisians much more than the wrongs done to thousands of brave and noble
men during the centuries previous, and furnished the burden of the
terrible cry with which the men of 1789 thundered at the walls of that
old fortress of feudal oppression, and with which they butchered not
only De Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, but Flesselles, the
_Provost Marshal_. The case of a woman--Mrs. Brinsmaid--was the last
drop in the cup of endurance, here, and the event which we believe was
finally and forever to close the melancholy doors of Lafayette and
Warren, against arrest without charge and imprisonment without
trial--spite of indemnity bills passed and unlimited powers conferred
upon the President by a mad Congress.

Through all this, meanwhile, John A. Kennedy was unquestionably more
sinned against than sinning--made the tool of worse and more
unscrupulous men, who used his hard conscientiousness and his narrow
bigotry of mind, fostered by too long and too close connection with the
lodges of secret societies--to carry out their own designs of despotism,
without the nobility to stand between him and his possible sacrifice for
obeying the very orders they had given. He is not the first man who has
been misused and placed in a false position, nor the last, as a later
victim of blind confidence and obedience, Burnside,[8] is very likely to
bear sad witness.

[Footnote 8: January 25th, 1863.]

But all this while, for the purposes of this narrative, Tom Leslie and
his friend Harding have been standing unnoticed in the presence of the
Superintendent. Not very long in reality--scarcely longer than enabled
them to note the hair and closely-cut full beard of iron gray, the keen
but troubled eyes, that had scarcely yet ceased to moisten at the memory
of the loss of a dearly loved