Returning to the house with a mind ill at ease, he closed the door and shutters, leaving the windows open. Then taking a revolver from its case in a drawer, he drew the charges, and reloaded the weapon. It was altogether unlikely that the hunters would come to his dwelling; still there was nothing like being ready; and Harrington with his Baconian faith that men without natural good were but a nobler sort of vermin, was quite resolved both to “prevent the fiend and to kill vermin,” as the Shakspearean phrase has it, if they crept near the hiding-place of the fugitive. His pistol loaded, he laid it on the table, and sat a few minutes thinking of the strangeness of his night’s adventure. How awful and marvellous it all was! The brother of Roux, whom he had tried to ransom, in his keeping—Roux himself in danger—Lafitte in the city, and master of the secret of his locality! The air seemed thick with peril. Rising presently, he put the lamp in the fire-place, and turned it low; then taking the cushion of his chair for a pillow, he wrapped himself in the camlet cloak, and lay down on the sofa. A few moments’ dazed reflection on the events of the night, and fatigued by his labors, he dropped away into dreamless slumber. CHAPTER XVIII. THE PRETTY PASS THINGS CAME TO. As an iceberg sinks dissolved into the waters of the Southern ocean, so sank the cold, blue night into the golden crystal of a warm, delicious day. Again beneath the hiving roofs of the great city, awoke the complex, many-actioned, myriad-thoughted swarm of life, and again through the grotesque and picturesque crooked streets poured the motley varieties of civic existence, with the municipal clash and rattle, the scurry of driving feet, the blab of many voices, the incessant buzzing roar. The traders went to their trade; the merchants to their stores and wharves; the mechanics to their labor; the little ones to their schools; the women to their household tasks; the lawyers to their courts; the clergy to their conventions; the anti-slavery people to their debate; the dark children of the race of Attucks to their humble toils, and the phantoms of the Reign of Terror with them. In the fencing-school, Monsieur Bagasse fenced with his pupils, pausing with curious eyes, and chin levelled at the door whenever a new footstep was heard upon the stairs, and wondering why Wentworth and Harrington, who had seldom failed before, did not arrive. Captain Vukovich, too, with thoughts intent on the cigar-shop he was going to open, and bent on consulting the young men with regard to the best situation, and perhaps invoking a little material aid, waited for them, meditatively stroking his thin moustache, and wandering up and down the fencing-school. But they both waited in vain, for the young men did not appear.