James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown

[66] usual; breakfast and dinner are provided, children cared for, and all external existence has the same smoothness that one observes at Niagara, just above the American Fall; but it impressed me anew on visiting this household at this time. Here was a family out of which four noble young men had, within a fortnight, been killed. I say nothing of a father under sentence of death, and a brother fleeing for his life, but only speak of those killed. Now that word killed is a word which one hardly cares to mention in a mourning household circle, even under all mitigating circumstances, when sad unavailing kisses and tender funeral rites have softened the last memories; how much less here, then, where it suggested not merely wounds, and terror, and agony, but also coffinless graves in a hostile land, and the last ignominy of the dissecting room.

Yet there was not one of that family who could not pronounce that awful word with perfect quietness; never, of course, lightly, but always quietly. For instance, as I sat that evening, with the women busily sewing around me, preparing the mother for her sudden departure with me on the morrow, some daguerreotypes were brought out to show me, and some one said, “ This is Oliver, one of those who were killed at Harper's Ferry.” I glanced up sidelong at the young, fair-haired girl, who sat near me by the little table — a wife at fifteen, a widow at sixteen; and this was her husband, and he was killed. As the words were spoken in her hearing, not a muscle quivered, and her finger did not tremble as she drew the thread. For her life had become too real to leave room for wincing at mere words. She had lived through, beyond the word, to the sterner fact, and having confronted that, language was an empty shell. To the Browns, killing means simply dying — nothing more; one gate into heaven, and that one a good deal frequented by their family; that is all.

There was no hardness about all this, no mere stoicism of will; only God had inured them to the realities of things. They were not supported by any notions of worldly honor or applause, nor by that chilly reflection of it, the hope of future fame. In conversing with the different members of this family, I cannot recall a single instance of any heroics of that description. There, in that secluded home among the mountains, what have they to do with the world's opinion, even now, still less next century? You remember Carlyle and his Frenchman, to whom he was endeavoring to expound the Scottish Covenanters. “ These poor, persecuted people,” said Carlyle,--“they made their appeal.” “Yes,” interrupted the Frenchman, “they appealed to posterity, no doubt.” “Not a bit of it,” quoth Carlyle; “ they appealed to the Eternal God!” So with these whom I visited. I was :he first person who had penetrated their solitude from the outer