Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

[Footnote 14: At this meeting the secretary was Ezra Lincoln, also a descendant of Samuel Lincoln of Hingham.]

HON. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

In answer to the many applications which we daily receive from
different parts of the State for this gentleman to speak, we
have to say that he left Boston on Saturday morning on his way
home to Illinois.

But Lincoln won something in New England of vastly deeper importance than a reputation for making popular campaign speeches. He for the first time caught a glimpse of the utter irreconcilableness of the Northern conviction that slavery was evil and unendurable, and the Southern claim that it was divine and necessary; and he began here to realize that something must be done. Listening to Seward's speech in Tremont Temple, he seems to have had a sudden insight into the truth, a quick illumination; and that night, as the two men sat talking, he said gravely to the great anti-slavery advocate:

"Governor Seward, I have been thinking about what you said in your speech. I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing."

[BEGUN IN THE APRIL NUMBER.]

A TALE OF BRAVE DEEDS AND PERILOUS VENTURES

BY ANTHONY HOPE,

Author of "The Prisoner of Zenda," "The Dolly Dialogues," etc.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS ALREADY PUBLISHED.

Lord Charles Wheatley, having taken leave in London (in a
parting not overcharged with emotion) of Miss Beatrice Hipgrave,
to whom he is to be married in a year; of her mother, Mrs.
Kennett Hipgrave. and of Mr. Bennett Hamlyn, a rich young man
who gives promise of seeing that Miss Hipgrave does not wholly
lack a man's attentions in the absence of her lover,--sets put
to enter possession of a remote Greek island, Neopalia, which he
has purchased of the hereditary lord, Stefanopoulos. But on
arriving he finds himself anything but welcome. He and his
companions,--namely, his cousin, Denny Swinton; his factotum,
Hogvardt; and his servant, Watkins,--are at once locked up; and
though released soon, it is with a warning from the populace,
headed by Vlacho, the innkeeper, that if found on the island
after six o'clock the next morning, their lives will not be
worth much. Toward midnight, little disposed to sleep, and
curious to look about somewhat before leaving the island, they
stroll inland, and come by chance upon the manor-house, still
and apparently deserted. Curiosity drives them to enter. They
find Lord Stefanopoulos, whom Vlacho had reported to them as
recently dead of a fever, not dead, but on the point of
dying--from a dagger wound. And the wound, they learn from his
own lips, was given him by his nephew, Constantine, in a tumult
that arose a few hours before when the people came up to protest
against the sale of the island, and to persuade the lord to send
the strangers away. Constantine, it further appears, is making
them all their trouble, having come to the island just ahead of
them to that end, after learning their plans by overhearing
Wheatley talking in a London restaurant. In the darkness, on
their way up, they have met a man and a woman going toward the
village. The man, by his voice, they knew to be Constantine. The
woman, they now learn, was the Lady Euphrosyne, cousin of
Constantine and heiress to the island. From talk overheard
between her and Constantine, she had seemed to be, while
desirous of their departure, also anxious to spare them harm. In
full possession of the house, they decide to stand siege, though
scant of provisions and ammunition, and armed only with their
own revolvers and a rifle left behind by Constantine. Soon
Stefanopoulos dies, and by an old serving-woman they send
warning to Constantine that he shall be brought to justice for
his crime. Thus passes the night. Next morning Wheatley's
attention is engaged by a woman studying them through a
field-glass from before a small bungalow, higher up the
mountain. Then Vlacho, the innkeeper, presents himself for a
parley, of which nothing comes but the disclosure that
Constantine is pledged to marry Euphrosyne, while already
secretly married to another woman. The evening falls with the
"death-chant" sounding in the air--a chant made by Alexander the
Bard when an earlier Lord Stefanopoulos was killed by the people
for having tried to sell the island. Lord Wheatley himself tells
the story.