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rooms on the ground floor; two small bed-rooms, of equal size, in the rear, and the large front room, which served ag kitchen and parlor. The little attic, being hot in summer and cold in winter, was seldom used, except for a storehouse.

More, left to himself, cleaned his gun, loaded it, set it up by his bedside, barred the doors, and then flung himself down without undressing. Not a sound of human presence crept to his ear through the stifling midnight; and, even while thinking of Curwin's threatened commitment, he fell sound asleep.

Two hours afterward the moon had not yet risen, and only starlight crept through the stirless branches of the pines. But the faint glimmer betrayed the forms of twelve men, some of them armed with guns, others with pistols, swords, or heavy canes, who stalked in Indian file from the cover of the older thickets, and advanced to the cabin. "Master Herrick," said one of them in a gruff whisper, "take six of the lads and put a gun at every door and window. Shoot him down if he runs, mind now."

Seven of the party filed off rapidly around a corner, and halted, one by one, at the outlets of the cabin. "And now," resumed the speaker, "you that haven't guns, you follow Cap'n Curwin. Don't use your swords, if you can help it. You might cut one another; and then we want to take him alive, you know."

He stepped up to the front door, and gave it a thundering rap with his knotty oak staff. There was no reply, and, after a moment's expectation, he repeated the summons. "Who's there?" cried a voice from within, recognizable as that of More. At the same instant, one of the men saw a white girlish face at a window, which disappeared with a shriek, as he instinctively raised his pistol. "Open!" shouted Curwin. "Open, in the name of the king of

terrors!"

The door was suddenly flung wide open, and More appeared in it, with his long fowling-piece half presented. Curwin struck up the unwieldy barrel with his cane, and the charge blazed over his head, almost deafening him by its report. As More stepped back to strike at greater ease, the justice sprang into the cabin, and made a second cool

and dexterous parry. The heavy iron glanced off his stick, but leveled a tall constable who had rushed in almost abreast of him. "Surrender!" roared Curwin. "Hurrah, boys! Down with him!"

Several others of the posse burst, shouting, into the room, and a contest ensued of the most frightful violence, rendered still more confused and horrible by the obscurity, the difficulty of distinguishing forms, or of avoiding the blind, furious blows which fell through the darkness. More, standing in the shadow and facing the light, had the advantage of seeing better where to strike than his assailants. He had no opportunity to change ends, and use his gun-breech; but three times he brought down its barrel with such force as to knock as many stout fellows prostrate and senseless. Then Herrick caught hold of the muzzle, and two others, flinging themselves upon it, bore it to the ground; while Curwin clutched More by the collar, and held on stoutly. But, before other hands could reinforce those of the justice, a dreadful blow in the face made him loose his hold, and flung him across the bodies of his fallen comrades. The pious gentleman blasphemed like a trooper in his rage, and, springing up, regardless of his gashed cheek, rushed again on the hunter, followed by the entire gang. Four of the assailants had fallen, but the remaining eight were all in the cabin, as maddened and reckless as hungry wolves. Their trampling and their savage exclamations mingled with, and almost overpowered, a succession of piercing shrieks which burst from the chamber behind More. Curwin again gripped his opponent by the collar, and clung to him with the tenacity of a wild-cat, although frightfully beaten in the face and breast. Herrick, too, dropped under a blow, but rose immediately, and, clubbing his pistol, struck More violently on the head with its heavy stock. A flash, a dispersing radiance, as of ten thousand stars, glittered before the hunter's eyes; and, throwing his arms high aloft, he fell heavily, with the tiger-like justice still clinging to his neck.

"Damn it, boys!—I mean heaven be praised!" said Curwin-"there he is, quiet as a lamb. Satan didn't help him much, after all. Who fetched him down? You, Herrick? Hope you haven't killed him.".

"Hope not," growled the sheriff, rubbing his head. "He's most killed me, though. Strike a light, somebody. Let's have a look at him!"

After some groping they found a candle, and lighted it from the coals which still smouldered under the ashes of the fire-place. All this time there was a dull groaning from the bruised men on the floor, some of whom were slowly wavering back to consciousness. The flickering glimmer of the candle showed their pale and bloody faces, occasionally writhing as if in vaguely-felt pain, together with the flushed visages of their comrades as they gazed at the nerveless limbs and gashed forehead of More. Curwin put his hand on the hunter's heart, and, after a moment of suspense, declared that he was still alive.

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Very good," said Herrick. "I should ha' been sorry to have killed him outright. Oughter be hung, of course. Well, boys, catch hold now, and put them poor fellers on the beds in the other rooms. Some on ye git some water to fetch 'em to. I s'pose they're ony in a stound.”

"I say, sheriff, this is queer," observed one of the men, as he wrenched at the door of Rachel's chamber. "This 'ere place is bolted on the outside; and yet, I'd take oath that I hearn a scream from the inside when we was a fighting."

"Oh, very likely Rachel is in there," Isaid Curwin. "Sure enough, where should she be? I reckon that he bolted the girl in there so as to keep her out of harm's way."

He lighted a second candle, and came to the door just as the man succeeded in throwing it open. There lay Rachel on her face, in her night-dress, with her hands extended, as if she had fainted in trying to force the portal. Curwin raised her with sudden gentleness, laid her on the bed, and covered her up decently. She was quite senseless and almost cold. He chafed her hands, and flung some water over her neck and forehead. After a while she gasped and opened her eyes, upon which he went out immediately, shutting the door behind him. He thought it was not best to have her learn at once the whole of her misfortune; and, strangely as the feeling may contrast with the scene which he had just helped to enact, he did not like to force himself upon the consciousness of a young

girl in her night-dress. He was a stern, unrelenting magistrate; but he was no brute, and he remembered that he, too, had a daughter.

It was strange to note how rapidly the victors had become cool-there was no excitement, no unnecessary noisethose desperate fighters had subsided at once into grave, calm Puritans. They quietly tended their bruised comrades, three of whom had now revived. More himself was gasping back to consciousness, under the effect of repeated dashes of water in the face; but, before he quite recovered his senses, Herrick prudently slipped a pair of manacles over his dangerous wrists. Presently he opened his eyes; stared vacantly at the beams overhead; then sat ap with a sudden effort, and looked sternly at the stooping Curwin. Well, how do you find yourself now, Master More?" said the justice with perfect coolness. More returned him no answer, but bent forward with an air of eager attention, for he heard a feeble voice in the next room, wailing out, "Father!"

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"Want to see her?" asked Curwin. "Come, get up then, and I'll help you in there."

More rose, with the magistrate's assistance, and walked rather unsteadily into the bed-room. Rachel was weakly trying to rise; but as soon as she saw him she fell back on the pillow, and held out her arms with a sob of joy like an infant. "Oh, he isn't dead, then. he is alive. Oh, Captain Curwin, please don't kill him. He isn't a witch; oh, indeed he isn't."

Oh,

"The court will settle that, Rachel," replied the justice, growing a little testy at hearing More's innocence so stoutly affirmed. "Come, child, let go of him. We must take him to the jail without tarrying."

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Oh, let me go with him," supplicated Rachel. "I won't say a word to youI won't trouble you, if you only will let me go with him."

"She go to jail!" echoed Herrick from the door. "No! It's cram full already."

"Let her go with me to the village," said More. "She shall stop at her uncle's. It is too bad to leave her here crying."

"Yes, yes; let me go with him as far as uncle Bowson's," urged the poor child, tears all the while running down her cheeks, her eyes fixed pleadingly on

Curwin, and her hands clutched nervously around her father's neck. The magistrate's face was woefully bruised, his teeth painful, and some of them shaky in their sockets, so that we must not blame him very severely for being a little bearish toward the hunter and his daughter. He rejected Rachel's petition positively at first, but then changed his mind and said that she might go; for it really seemed the best way. They left the room, and in five minutes the girl came out ready dressed. Herrick and four of the special con

stables had, by this time, led, the prisoner out of the cabin. "Where's that gal?" shouted the brutal sheriff. Come along, will ye? But none of yer whining. I won't have it."

Rachel stifled her sobs and placed herself close behind her father, who was held by two of the constables. "Forward," said Herrick, and they moved on, at a quick walk, along the narrow pathway. Curwin remained at the cabin, partly to tend the bruised ones, partly to search for puppets and other instruments of sorcery.

LECTURES AND LECTURERS.

THE lyceum is the American theatre.

It is the one institution in which we take our nose out of the hands of our English prototypes-the English whom we are always ridiculing and always following-and go alone. The consequence is, that it is a great success. It has founded a new profession. It provides a weekly amusement in the smallest and remotest towns, and it secures to the insatiable Yankee the chance, an hour long, of seeing any notability about whom he was curious.

Lecturing is the manner in which the Yankee hunts lions. He clubs with his neighbors and they make up a purse. They call themselves a lyceum. They hire a large room, for a trap, and hang fifty dollars over the desk, as a bait. Then they scour the hills and valleys, the cities and villages of their own, their native land, and wherever they see a lion of fair size and tolerable roar, they seize him by letter, hurry him by steam to the trap, turn him in, crowd after him, and watch him carefully during the hour he occupies in consuming the bait. The lecture audience is usually large. The clergyman of the village deems the lecture an instructive and healthy amusement; the literary man of the neighborhood goes to criticise; Corydon and Phillis go to flirt; the boys go for fun; and a few stragglers drop in as to a warm place for sleeping. If the locture is laughable, all goes well. If grave, it is rather dull. If the grave lecturer is young, it is a passable evening; if he is old and married, and, above all, a bishop, it is intolerable.

We have all had a good deal of experience of this lecture performance during the last six years. The hunt has been prosecuted for that period with unwearied vigor. Before that, there were courses of lectures, and occasional single lectures. The members of lyceums, in small towns, volunteered to contribute a series of discourses themselves, or they hired some provincial celebrity for a half-dozen evenings. Scientific lectures did well-provided a mimic house were kindled by the electrical battery, or a little cannon were fired off by a mirror. Then the fever shifted from science to Shakespeare, and the lecturer spread his eagle wings above those of the swan. In those earlier days, not very remote, the lecturer's fee was small. To go from a Boston feather-bed, out into the dreary Puritanic wilds, whereon the east wind pas tures, and the relentless year, in the intervals of chilly fogs, sows snow, was considered to be worth ten dollars. For that sum you were privileged to address, in a cold room-haply a school-housea cold crowd of your fellow-Puritans, who regarded you severely, as a man who was being petted and spoiled by indulgent over-payment. Thence, without applause for the severity of the season, and the habitual rigor of rural manners, forbade such folly-you were taken to a house-the chairman's, perhaps-and there entertained with intellectual conversation and cold apples. Thence to bed-! Oh! draw the curtains, before the fingers freeze! No! nobody knows what coldness is, they

tell us, who has not been a lecturer, and put to bed in the best chamber, in January. Saddened and humbled, you descended to the fried pork, swimming in its own sap, for breakfast; or the toothsome steak, boiled in a skillet; and drowning it all in a dreadful decoction of boot-heels, mixed with cold milk, which is drank with enthusiasm by the American from Maine to Texas, and called coffee, you were sent back to your Boston, with the thermometer at zero, and ten dollars in your pocket. You were remorselessly handled in the weekly village paper of the next Saturday by Aristides and Z, a copy of the paper being sent to you by each of the nibbling anonymouses, and you threw them into the fire hastily, to spare your dear Jane Maria's feelings-thereby getting the only warmth you had derived from your little lecturing effort, in the Puritanic purlieus of the metropolis of Suffolk.

But times change, and fees. While Mr. Ticknor gave his admirable lectures upon Shakespeare, and Mr. Dana his, and Mr. Hudson his, and Mr. Emerson intoned his lyric wisdom; while Dr. Cyclopædia Lardner proved to us, scientifically, that steam-ships could not cross the sea-and the demonstration and steamer arrived together-while the pious and persuasive Joseph Silk Buckingham told us of Lebanon and the Ganges, and innumerable "Professors," with electrical machines and mirrors, flashed between, the public taste was gradually ripening for the system of popular lectures as it is now conducted, and as the far-seeing Herald and other E. M.'s of the press regularly inform us, at the beginning of every season, it will not be conducted much longer.

For ourselves, we doubt whether the lecturing term has yet completed its great cycle. If it has, we are quite confident that another one has commenced. If you will reflect a moment, you will see that the public of this country has been addressed now, for more than six years, weekly, upon every variety of topic, by the best oratorical talent of the land. Now, every seed helps some kind of harvest. If you sow tares, tares, at least, will come up. The public has been pursuing lions without mercy; but, then, it has also watched them while they devoured the bait. If a man stood upon his head, for ten minutes, upon a clothes-pole, any

where within reach of the post, the return mail, without doubt, brought him a hundred letters from the Y. M. A. of B., C., and D., to address them upon Thursday evening, the 25th; but, if he went, he did stand upon his head; or, if he could not, it was the end of his lecturing career, and he was asked no

more.

What do the results show? That, although it was the roar of the animal which attracted the hunters, yet it was his strength or his beauty which enchanted their eyes and hearts. You, for instance, had walked over the desert, or through the valleys of the sea; your blithe genius or your fiery rhetoric had lighted the house of God with the beauty of holiness; your name was, consequently, tossed from tongue to tongue, and the editor's trumpet had whispered your deed to every lonely corner of the land with its morning music. Then the lion-hunters came down upon you. Then you were summoned to leave a lecture and take fifty dollars. But when your hour was past, if, in your tone, or mien, or manner, if, somewhere in your presence, there were no touch of that power, whose mere report fascinated, then, indeed, and forever, your hour was past.

Think, how few men have done the lecturing for this country, during half-adozen years. Hundreds of men have lectured, yet there are but a score or two whose names figure upon the lists of every lyceum, and who are first invited everywhere. A lecturer told us, that he went from Maine to the Missis sippi, two years ago, and there were certain names that appeared upon every programme along the route. With only one or two exceptions, the same names and men do lecture-duty this year, and probably will during the next.

Who are those men, and what does their universal popularity imply?

They are the intellectual leaders of an intelligent progress in the country. · They are especially, and in the best seuse, Americans. They are, we believe, without an exception, of the largest and wisest liberality of thought and culture. They are men of all pursuits, and ages, and denominations; but if they are clergymen, as some of the chiefest are, then, whatsoever their form of faith, it is vivified by Christian charity. Week after week, from November to April, these men go through

the land, talking in the most genial, zerious, witty, learned, or wise way, about all kinds of subjects. Week after week, throngs of people, of every age and every degree of cultivation, come to listen and enjoy. The lyceum is opera, theatre, ball; and yet this fact is remarkable: if the lecture be only ludicrous or amusing, if the object of the lecturer be plainly only to make himself a buffoon, and to make his audience laugh-they do laugh, but they do not forgive him. The experience of the system shows, that the men who have hidden the soundest sense under the most brilliant and humorous rhetoric are the permanently popular lecturers.

This, of course, is in the nature of the case. The value of a lecture is in its general tone, rather than in its details. It is a fresco picture. It is to be contemplated by a multitude at a distance. With the utmost propriety, therefore, the lecturer lays on his color freely. If he be a man accustomed rather to write to be read than to be heard, he will soon discover that the essay, polished with care in his study, and full of genial delights to the eye, falls dull upon the ear-for they are different organs. To the secret bower of your heart's approval, as to a boudoir in a palace, there are two approachesthe stately gateway and the private door. Through the one you pass with noiseless, gliding footstep; but through the other with the resonant prance of steeds. Therefore, many a lecturer will not allow his lecture to be printed, and they all quarrel with the reporters. He will tell you that you must not read it. You must hear it. What right have you to climb into the lofty belfry, and survey, with curious inquisition, the hues and joints of the statue that strikes the hour? Does it seem to you a buge, shapeless, bronze giant, banging with a great hammer a shield of metal, and causing a crash of roaring sound? To the eye below, for which it was designed, it seems a fairy tapping a flower-bell, and the car, it was meant for, hears music trickling from it like melodious drops of dew.

Now, is it likely these men have been talking all this time quite without effect? Have the towns and cities been piped to and wept to in such various measures, and must no dance or tears be looked for? We believe, on the contrary, that no

institution has done more in humanizing and refining us than the lecture. How rapidly it has done this may be seen in the kind of lecture that is now required. The old recipe was simply, having caught your encyclopædia or biographical article, to flay it, and squeeze it, and cover it with some worsted work of your own, lard it liberally with the least worn jokes that could be procured; then serve, warm, for an hour. This is no longer possible. The audience gradually tired of such diet, higher prices and higher-toned lectures came in together, and the public, which had been educated by a constantly improving character, now demands the best. The very number of the most popular lectures shows this. Why are there no more? Why are there not new ones every year? It seems so easy and so delightful to pass a summer week in writing a lecture, and three months of the winter in delivering it, and so completing the business of the year. It is easy to those who can do it. There seems to be no especial reason for you to laugh at them, until you have tried it for yourself and contemplated the result.

Undoubtedly, a lecture is the most profitable form of literary labor. A lecturer, in the flood-tide of his career, will write a discourse of sixty or eighty pages, occupying an hour in the delivery, which he will deliver five evenings in the week for three months; and if he be paid, as he probably will be, fifty dollars every time, his three months' lecturing give him just three thousand dollars. If he publish his manuscript as a pamphlet, how soon would he get three thousand dollars for it? And the next season he may repeat his lecture, and his receipts or, if he prefers not to be paid, he may decline the fee, but express his willingness to receive "a compliment" of double the amount.

But no hod-carrier or mariner earns his money more laboriously and faithfully than a lecturer. Wherever, between November and April, there is a snow-drift, you may be sure there is a lecturer in it. Wherever there is a tough beef-steak, you may be sure there is a lecturer eating it. Wherever there is a sullen, dusky dawn, with the mercury lost below zero, you may know there is a lecturer getting up in it. And oh, north poles and glaciers! wherever there is a bed-chamber without a fire

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