of the birds, singing cheerily, ignorant of the abyss of cruelty and crime over which they sang.

Toward sunset a rustling was heard in the branches of the oak, and Dred dropped down into the inclosure, wet and soiled, and wearied. All gathered round him in a moment.

"Where is Jim?" asked Harry.

"Slain!" said Dred. "The archers pressed him sore, and he hath fallen in the wilderness!

There was a general exclamation of horror. Dred made a movement to sit down on the earth. He lost his balance and fell; and they all saw now, what at first they had not noticed, a wound in his breast, from which the blood was welling. His wife fell by his side with wild moans of sorrow. He lifted his hand and motioned her from him.

"Peace," he said, "peace! It is enough! Behold, I go unto the witnesses who cry day and night!

The circle stood around him in mute horror and surprise. Clayton was the first who had presence of mind to kneel and stanch the blood. Dred looked at him; his calm, large eyes filled with supernatural light.

"All over!" he said.

He put his hand calmly to his side, and felt the gushing blood. He took some in his hand and threw it upward, crying out with wild energy, in the words of an ancient prophet,

"Oh, earth, earth, earth! Cover thou not my blood!"

Behind the dark barrier of the woods the sun was setting gloriously. Piles of loose, floating clouds, which all day long had been moving through the sky in white and silvery stillness, now one after another took up the rosy flush, and became each one a light-bearer filled with ethereal radiance. And the birds sang on as they ever sing, unterrified by the great wail of human sorrow.

It was evident to the little circle that He who is mightier

than the kings of the earth was there, and that that splendid frame, which had so long rejoiced in the exuberance of health and strength, was now to be resolved again into the eternal elements.

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'Harry," he said, "lay me beneath the heap of witness. Let the God of their fathers judge between us!"

CHAPTER LIII

THE BURIAL

THE death of Dred fell like a night of despair on the hearts of the little fugitive-circle in the swamps, on the hearts of multitudes in the surrounding plantations, who had regarded him as a prophet and a deliverer. He in whom they trusted was dead! The splendid, athletic form, so full of wild vitality, the powerful arm, the trained and keen-seeing eye, all struck down at once! The grand and solemn voice hushed, and all the splendid poetry of olden time, the inspiring symbols and prophetic dreams, which had so wrought upon his own soul, and with which he had wrought upon the souls of others, seemed to pass away with him, and to recede into the distance and become unsubstantial, like the remembered sounds of mighty winds, or solemn visions of evening clouds, in times long departed.

On that night, when the woods had ceased to reverberate the brutal sounds of baying dogs, and the more brutal profanity of drunken men; when the leaves stood still on the trees, and the forest lay piled up in the darkness like black clouds, and the morning star was standing like a calm angelic presence above them, there might have been heard in the little clearing a muffled sound of footsteps, treading heavily, and voices of those that wept with a repressed and quiet weeping, as they bore the wild chieftain to his grave beneath the blasted tree. Of the undaunted circle who had met there at the same hour many evenings before, some had dared to be present to-night; for, hearing the report of the hunt, they had left their huts on the plantations by stealth,

when all were asleep, and, eluding the vigilance of the patrols, the night-watch which commonly guards plantations, had come to the forest to learn the fate of their friends; and bitter was the dismay and anguish which filled their souls when they learned the result. It is melancholy to reflect that among the children of one Father an event which excites in one class bitterness and lamentation should in another be cause of exultation and triumph. But the world has been thousands of years and not yet learned the first two words of the Lord's Prayer; and not until all tribes and nations have learned these will his kingdom come, and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Among those who stood around the grave, none seemed more bowed down and despairing than one whom we have before introduced to the reader under the name of Hannibal. He was a tall and splendidly formed negro, whose large head, high forehead, and marked features indicated resolution and intellectual ability. He had been all his life held as the property of an uneducated man, of very mean and parsimonious character, who was singularly divided in his treatment of him by a desire to make the most of his energies and capabilities as a slave, and a fear lest they should develop so fast as to render him unfit for the condition of slavery.

Hannibal had taught himself to read and write, but the secret of the acquisition was guarded in his own bosom as vigilantly as the traveler among thieves would conceal in his breast an inestimable diamond; for he well knew that, were these acquisitions discovered, his master's fears would be so excited as to lead him to realize at once a present sum upon him by selling him to the more hopeless prison-house of the far South, thus separating him from his wife and family.

Hannibal was generally employed as the keeper of a ferryboat by his master, and during the hours when he was wait

ing for passengers found many opportunities for gratifying, in an imperfect manner, his thirst for knowledge.

Those who have always had books about them, more than they could or would read, know nothing of the passionate eagerness with which a repressed and starved intellect devours in secret its stolen food. In a little chink between the logs of his ferry-house there was secreted a Bible, a copy of "Robinson Crusoe," and an odd number of a Northern newspaper which had been dropped from the pocket of a passenger; and when the door was shut and barred at night, and his bit of pine knot lighted, he would take these out and read them hour by hour. There he yearned after the wild freedom of the desolate island. He placed his wife and children, in imagination, in the little barricaded abode of Robinson. He hunted and made coats of skin, and gathered strange fruits from trees with unknown names, and felt himself a free man.

Over a soul so strong and so repressed it is not to be wondered at that Dred should have acquired a peculiar power. The study of the Bible had awakened in his mind that vague tumult of aspirations and hopes which it ever excites in the human breast; and he was prompt to believe that the Lord who visited Israel in Egypt had listened to the sighings of their captivity, and sent a prophet and a deliverer to his people. Like a torch carried in a stormy night, this hope had blazed up within him; but the cold blast of death had whistled by, and it was extinguished forever.

Among the small band that stood around the dead, on the edge of the grave, he stood, looking fixedly on the face of the departed. In the quaint and shaggy mound to which Dred had attached that strange, rugged, Oriental appellation, Jegar Sahadutha, or the "heap of witness," there was wildly flaring a huge pine-knot torch, whose light fell with a red, distinct glare on the prostrate form that lay there like a kingly cedar uprooted, no more to wave its branches in