And thus he wrote to his half-brother, to his old schoolmaster, to his son Jason, and to many others. Every word is expressive of the deepest anxiety for the welfare of his loved ones, and a calm trust in the God of all as to the righteousness of his cause. Such words and such behaviour do not comport with the "black heart" which a large part of the nation was then ascribing to him. It is true, he told a clergyman of a Southern church who attempted to draw an argument in defence of Slavery, that he did not know the A B Cs of Christianity since he was entirely ignorant of the meaning of the word, "I, of course, respect you as a gentleman, but it is as a _heathen_ gentleman." I can, myself, appreciate to some extent what must have been the feelings of the prisoner at the religious ministrations offered him; for I well remember with what a skeptical air I heard the prayer and the words of a Rebel clergyman who visited the prison in which I was confined in 1865. I knew he was daily praying God to bring defeat to my comrades in arms, to increase the number of prisoners, in fine, for the triumph of the Confederate cause. He undertook a pretty serious task, that of talking entertainingly in a general way to a company of Federal prisoners. Had he come to kneel by the side of a dying man, and to point the way to eternal life, it had been different; but for doctrinal policies what cared we? We had empty stomachs, and till they were filled all creeds were alike illusory. Preaching to hungry men was not a success, and he came but seldom--indeed I remember only once. Dead men were carried out daily, but they went unattended by religious rites. I recall now the thought, if God heard his prayer and answered it, of what avail was mine; but I was certain that mine was the one listened to, and that being the case, of what avail was his opinion on the state of the country any way? During these weeks the condemned man is visited by large numbers of people, both friends and foes; but before no one does he for a moment weaken in his constant declaration of the correctness of his cause. Some of the verbal shot that his proslavery interlocutors received were as hot as those which he fired from his musket into their midst on that terrible Monday--for instance, he told Col. Smith, of the Virginia Military Institute, that he would as soon be escorted to his death by blacklegs or robbers as by slave-holding ministers. Socrates, awaiting the death which slowly creeps from his extremities to his heart converses not more quietly and resignedly to those about him than does this decided old man of Harper's Ferry. One, a Stoic, discourses on Death and Immortality; and dying, desires his followers to offer a cock to Æsculapius. The other, a Christian, ceases not to converse concerning the wrongs of an oppressed race, and of his deep anxiety for the slaves; and his last written words were: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the