alternative. You shall die or live, as you answer!'

'I am ready, my lord. You somewhat mistake my character, if you think that I shall fall back from the truth, because of the consequences which it may happen to bring with it. Ha! What is that?

He was interrupted by a sudden blast of the bugle, a confused hum of voices, and then a shriek. Another, and another, wild to and piercing, rose from the court in front. At that instant, a soldier entering the apartment threw open the doors, and gave an opportunity for those within to behold the awful tragedy that had been go- 15 ing on the while. A single tree in front of the place bore twenty human bodies; the limbs were yet quivering in the air with their agonizing convulsions, and the executioner was not yet done.

20

'Close the door, sergeant,' said Cornwallis calmly. Then, continuing his exhortation to Walton, he made use of the awful circumstance which they had just witnessed, the more earnestly to im- 25 press his desires upon the mind of the hearer, and produce in him a different determination.

'An awful doom, but necessary. It is one, Colonel Walton, from which I would 30 gladly save you. Why will you reject the blessings of life? Why will you resist the mercies which still seek to prevent the purposes of justice?'

'Justice!' was the scornful exclama- 35 tion of the prisoner, and all that he deigned to reply.

Aye, sir, justice! The cause of the rightful monarch of this country is the cause of justice; and its penalties are in- 40 curred by disloyalty before all other offenses. But argument is needless here.' 'It is it is needless,' said Walton, emphatically.

And, therefore,' Cornwallis proceeded 45 therefore, sir, I confine myself to the brief suggestion which I now make you, by the adoption of which you will escape your present difficulties. Though you have twice rejected his majesty's terms 50 of favor, he is reluctant to destroy.'

'That tree attests the reluctance. It bears its own illustration, my lord, which your assertion, nevertheless, does not need. I hear you, sir.'

disconcerted,

Somewhat Cornwallis, with a show of rising impatience, hurried to a conclusion.

Once more, sir, he offers you safety; once more he tenders you an honorable appointment in his armies. Here, sir, is his commission-take it. Go below to 5 the Ashley and make up your own regiment; choose your own officers, and do for him what you have hitherto fruitlessly sought to do for his enemies.' 'Never, sir, never!' was the conclusive reply.

Yet, a while, bethink you. You know the doom else death the gallows.' 'I know it; I have thought: you have my answer.'

Then, you die- die like a dog, sir, in the scorn of all around you.'

'Be it so. I hope, and fear not, to die like a man. My country will avenge me. I am ready!'

'Your country!' said Cornwallis, scornfully. Then turning to Rawdon, he gave his order.

'My Lord Rawdon, you will instantly detach an especial guard for the prisoner, in addition to that which has been designated to conduct the prisoners of war taken in the late action to the Charleston provost. He shall go with them to Dorchester.'

'For what? with what object? why to Dorchester, my lord?' was the anxious inquiry of Walton.

'You shall die there, sir, as an example to the rebels of that quarter. You shall suffer where you are most known — where your loss would be most felt.'

'Let me die here, my lord! I pray you for this mercy. The mere place of execution is of small importance to your object. Not there not there - almost in sight of my child.'

'There, and there only, Colonel Walton. Your doom is sealed; and, refusing our mercy, you must abide our penalty. Make out your orders, my Lord Rawdon, to the officer of the station, Major Proctor; I will sign them. Say to him that the rebel must be executed at the village entrance, within three days after the guard shall arrive. Take him away!'

Such was the British jurisdiction; such was the summary administration of justice under Lord Cornwallis. These items 55 are mostly historical; and fiction here has not presumed to add a single tittle to the evidence which truth has given us of these events.

(1835)

(1835)

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

Like Hawthorne, Longfellow was not a native member of the Boston literary circle that ruled the mid-century in America. Portland, Maine, was his birthplace, an overgrown village in 1807, greatly more concerned with its material welfare than with literature and its production. His father, a leading lawyer of the place, a man of affairs who later represented the district in Congress, had books in his home and an unprovincial atmosphere of refinement rare in his day, and he encouraged his son to attend college, the struggling little college at Brunswick, Maine, at no great distance away, the entrance examinations of which he passed in 1821 when he was fourteen years of age. Books appealed to the boy. Unlike Hawthorne, whom he soon met as a classmate, he made a record as a scholar especially in language and literature, and when he was graduated in 1825 it was with real misgivings that he settled down to study for his father's profession. Already had he dreamed of a literary career, dreams that his practical father had discouraged since the country was not rich enough and cultured enough to allow a man to depend upon literature as a profession. A year of drudgery at the law and then came the miracle that changed his whole career. His alma mater had founded a chair of modern languages, the second to be established in an American college, and, looking about for a candidate to fill it, they remembered quite by chance the brilliant translation of an ode by Horace they had heard made by the young graduate of the year before. Eagerly the boy of twenty accepted the offer which carried with it the provision that there was to be preliminary study in Europe for which they advanced $600 a year, and in 1826 he sailed for what was to him a veritable wonderland, Europe, the home of romance and literature and poetry. He was gone three years, golden years in France and Spain and Italy and Germany, returning in 1829 for six years of teaching at Bowdoin, years in which he prepared his own text-books, wrote glowing descriptions of European lands for the magazines of the time, issued his first real book, Outre-Mer, and became generally known as a young scholar of brilliant promise, so brilliant indeed that when in 1835 the chair of modern languages at Harvard was left vacant by the resignation of the scholarly Ticknor it was offered to him as the one best fitted in America for the position. Again he went abroad for preparation, this time with his young wife whom he had married in 1831 at Portland. The summer and autumn they spent in England and in Sweden; with the winter they moved to Holland; then suddenly at Rotterdam came the tragedy that turned completely the channel of his life: the sudden death of his wife and the burial in the land of strangers.

The winter that followed at Heidelberg made of him the Longfellow that we know to-day. Bereft, alone, haunted by memories, he spent it in the twilight of German romance. He buried himself in the volumes of Novalis and Bürger and Schlegel and the others, poets of the mystic border between the seen and the unseen, lovers of the night, of sadness and longing and romantic dreams. He returned to Harvard to publish Hyperion, redolent of German romance, and Voices of the Night, 1839,- the title is significant,- and to follow these with other volumes of blended sentiment and feeling and reverence for the romantic past, sadness and longing and mellow Irving-like atmospheres. And he chorded as few other poets ever have done with the mood of his people and his age. His success was almost instantaneous. He became the best loved of the American poets, the familiar poet of the people.

His later biography is largely a record of his various books. After eighteen years as professor at Harvard, he resigned his chair in 1854 and a year later published perhaps the most striking of his poetical works, Hiawatha. Another tragedy came later into his life, the accidental death of his second wife, but it did not embitter him. At the time of his death in 1882 he was perhaps the most reverenced of all Americans; his patriarchal features, bearded like an ancient bard, peculiarly satisfying to the imagination, may be seen now in every school-house in the land. He has been accepted in England as a member of the select circle that made the nineteenth century distinctive in the field of poetry in the English tongue, and he is one of the very few Americans who have been given a memorial in Westminster Abbey. He has been read much in Germany, but in the south of Europe he has made little impression. France always has preferred Poe.