entered another long stretch of sombre forest, and finally emerged into an opening, a mere clearing in the woods, where, right before us in the near distance, stood the humble home of the heroic martyr, solitary amidst the "solitude that had taught him how to die."

We entered the house stiff in every limb, I might say, half frozen, and glad enough to feel the genial heat of the small stove around which we found ourselves part of a very considerable company of people, mostly friends and neighbors, who had personally known and admired the man who had gone forth from them a simple shepherd, and now was brought back dead with a fame gone out into all the world.

Presently Mr. Wendell Phillips came into the room; a few words were exchanged, and then retiring for a few minutes, he returned and said to me: "Mr. Young you are a minister; admiration for this dead hero and sympathy with this bereaved family must have brought you here journeying all night through the cold rain and over the dismal mountains to reach this place. It would give Mrs. Brown and the other widows great satisfaction if you would perform the usual service of a clergyman on this occasion." Of course there was but one answer to make to such a request,— from that moment I knew why God had sent me there. For it must be remembered that five households and four families of North Elba were striken by that blow at Harper's Ferry.

The funeral took place at one o'clock. The services bagan with a hymn which had been a favorite. with Mr. Brown and with which he had successively sung all his children to sleep.

"Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound.
Let all the nations know
To earth's remotest bound,
The year of jubilee has come."

Sung to the good old tune of Lenox it was at once recognized by all who knew anything about the old fashioned music, and all who could sing joined in; while, heard, above all the rest, were the plaintive voices of the deeply moved negroes who, most of them fugitive slaves, constituted quite one half of the company. After the hymn followed the prayer. It was a spontaneous offering, so the papers said at the time, and remarkably consonant with the spirit of the occasion. It was reported in full in the New York Tribune. I only know I prayed. Then followed one of Wendell Phillips' matchless speeches. Never were his lips of music wore eloquent with tenderness and sympathy; and when, from addressing the weeping widows and fatherless. children, he rose on the very wings of inspiration, into sublime passages of description and prophecy, every hearer saw great vision,-one never to be forgotten. For this was more than a Mark Anthony speaking over more than a Caesar's dead body.

Another hymn was then sung, during which the coffin was placed on a table before the door with the head exposed so that all could see it. It was almost as natural as life. There was a flush on the face, resulting probably from the peculiar mode of his death, and nothing of the pallor that is usual when life is extinct. Then followed the short procession from the house to the grave which was dug at the base of a great picturesque rock about fifty feet from the house, by the side of which already reposed, removed from their

Nothing more was added. The words seemed to fall like balm on all who heard them. The sobs were hushed, and soon the family retired from the grave leaving their dead with God.

It was now three o'clock and immediate preparations to return were necessary that we might reach the nearest inn before the night was far advanced. As we drove away we were powerfully impressed with the beauty and grandeur of the surrounding country, and remarked that there was a peculiar fitness between the strong and original character of the man and the region he had chosen for his final home and long resting place.

North Elba was then, and is still, aside from its great summer hotels, but a plantation in the wilderness; a small hamlet of a hundred souls or so. The little cottage which has become historic and is now a much frequented shrine for hero-worship, stands on an elevated plain, faces the east and overlooks a magnificent prospect of wild grandeur, of rugged mountains and a vast primeval forest, awful in its solitude and silence, just the country for the heroic soul of John Brown and a proper place to be the receptacle of his ashes.

Wendell Phillips once said that Massachusetts will eventually claim John Brown's remains for interment within her own soil. May it never be! Let them stay beside the great boulder, itself a relic of the ancient glacial age, bearing on its longest slope, in letters a foot long, the inscription:

JOHN BROWN
DEC. 2ND, 1859

Here Nature's Own hand has built for his lasting monument,

"The great watchtowers of the mountains: And they lift their heads far into the sky And gaze ever upward and around To see if the judge of the world come not."

When I got back to Burlington I had been gone just two days. The next day was Saturday, the next Sunday.

How vividly I recall that Sunday, my text, my sermon, my subject, Christ's example of lowly service, washing his disciples' feet, the symbol of willingness to serve for love's sake. I remarked the appearance of the congregation, many new faces seldom or never seen there before; many familiar ones conspicuous by their absence; and, in the atmosphere, a certain unmistakable indication that things were different. But nothing visible occurred; only a sort of sea-turn had set in and a chilling mist hung on the air.

The next day I learned what had happened. Six of the wealthiest families of my parish had taken an oath and gone over to a neighboring church; others, not a few, of the

class that follow in the train of the

rich, were equally disaffected. On all sides the arrows of public rebuke began to fly. On the street I observed that old friends seeing me. coming, suddenly remembered that they had forgotten something and turned back, or, crossing over, passed by on the other side. And when the next issue of the Burlington Sentinel appeared-a "proslavery sheet-it opened its batteries upon me with a full broadside. Even women stepped in to serve at the guns, and their shots were sharper than the men's. My motives, my life-aims, my principles were made the target of insinuation, misrepresentation, ridicule and

abuse. I was called all manner of names. I was an "anarchist," a "traitor to my country." I was an "infidel," a "blasphemer," and a "vile associate of Garrison and Phillips." In the course of a day or two there appeared on the street a copy of the New York Illustrated News, and what merriment there was, with many a gibe and jeer, in shop and store, wherever men met together, over the pictures which the paper contained: the funeral scenes, the family and the participants in the ceremonies of the occasion! Of course, the officiating clergyman was not left out, but was there with the usual exaggeration of caricature. To some of my friends who had up to this time half stood by me, it then seemed, no doubt, as if my face had been put into the rogues' gallery; that I had not only brought odium upon myself, but shame and confusion of face to them; and to the church of which I was pastor, grevious reproach.

It was indeed a melancholy state of affairs, be it confessed, but it was of a piece of a whole disordered condition of the country. country. The

times were stormy; we were on a vexed and tossing sea, and everybody was dizzy.

No one who did not live and move among those eventful times which tried men's souls, certainly no one born since the Civil War, can have any adequate conception of the then existing political and social condition of the country, and of the fierce divisions of the public mind.

Going to the burial of John Brown, I left Burlington a respected and beloved pastor. I returned to find myself in disgrace, an exile in the place of my residence, and little better than a social outcast. Honorable men there were who suggested

Vir

Let me take my leave by reminding the reader that all advances in justice, in morality, in liberty, have been imposed upon, or forced from society by some noble violence. "Sacrifice is the passion of great souls." That crusade at Harper's Ferry was under God's eye. ginia, "the mother of presidents," where the blow was struck, was a slave-breeding State, and as such had "incorporated licentiousness into a commercial system and prostituted half her women." Brown's enterprise against slavery was not a piece of spite or revenge for the terrible wrongs which he and his sons had suffered in Kansas, but the keeping of a vow made to heaven in his early youth.

When a mere lad, seeing a slave boy about his own age, cruelly illtreated, John Brown wrote in his diary: "I swear eternal enmity against slavery." Become a man, he is writing letters to his brothers lamenting the sluggish conscience of the church and discussing peaceful methods for the abolishment of the barbarous institution. Then again. we see him calling his sons together to pledge them, kneeling in prayer, to give their lives to anti-slavery work.

"Brown with a hunger for righteousness, his soul was kindled with the purest and most passionate love

of liberty, and, under the shaping and controlling severity of this idea, he lived all his life. It pressed all his powers into the spirit and endless pursuit of freedom." This object was the head-waters of his whole career from his youth up, and explains all.

Would we therefore be fair, would we be just, would we judge righteous judgment and measure the moral bulk and stature of this man, we must see with the eye of the spirit that the majesty of his undertaking is not in what he did; that is, in the ill-starred invasion of Virginia; but in the purpose for which he sacrificed his life-in its last analysis, that this great continent might be free!

In the eloquent words of Frederick Douglas; in whose veins mingled the blood of both races,

"it stands out in the annals of history with peculiar originality. In it human and divine sympathy crashed through like a bolt from the sky, and broke down all suggestions of human prudence.

"All down the ages men had been known to die in defence of their own liberty, and for that of their friends, and all the world had applauded such examples. But the example of John Brown is as far as heaven is from earth, above such examples. It is lifted above self, family, friend, race. No chains had bound his ankle. No yoke had galled his neck. It was not for his own freedom, or the freedom of a family, or the freedom of a class that he laid down his life. It was not Caucasian for Caucasian; not white man for white man; not rich man for rich man, but it was Caucasian for Ethiopian, rich man for poor man, white man for black man; the man admired and respected for the man despised and rejected."

O, story of divinest love, of splendid fate! Outside of the New Testament it has no parallel in human history. His was one of those deaths which gave life unto the world, which compress into a single hour the purposes of a century. His name shall never perish out of the memory and the wonder of men.

"He lived, he died to be forever known And make each age to come his own."