There is a woman at the bottom of almost every revolution--political as well as social. Tradition tells us, though history is silent on the subject, that the sad fate of the daughter of a French citizen, flung into the Bastille for alleged complicity in a conspiracy during the early days of Louis XVI., and dying there--rankled in the minds of the Parisians much more than the wrongs done to thousands of brave and noble men during the centuries previous, and furnished the burden of the terrible cry with which the men of 1789 thundered at the walls of that old fortress of feudal oppression, and with which they butchered not only De Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, but Flesselles, the _Provost Marshal_. The case of a woman--Mrs. Brinsmaid--was the last drop in the cup of endurance, here, and the event which we believe was finally and forever to close the melancholy doors of Lafayette and Warren, against arrest without charge and imprisonment without trial--spite of indemnity bills passed and unlimited powers conferred upon the President by a mad Congress. Through all this, meanwhile, John A. Kennedy was unquestionably more sinned against than sinning--made the tool of worse and more unscrupulous men, who used his hard conscientiousness and his narrow bigotry of mind, fostered by too long and too close connection with the lodges of secret societies--to carry out their own designs of despotism, without the nobility to stand between him and his possible sacrifice for obeying the very orders they had given. He is not the first man who has been misused and placed in a false position, nor the last, as a later victim of blind confidence and obedience, Burnside,[8] is very likely to bear sad witness. [Footnote 8: January 25th, 1863.] But all this while, for the purposes of this narrative, Tom Leslie and his friend Harding have been standing unnoticed in the presence of the Superintendent. Not very long in reality--scarcely longer than enabled them to note the hair and closely-cut full beard of iron gray, the keen but troubled eyes, that had scarcely yet ceased to moisten at the memory of the loss of a dearly loved brother,[9] the face care-worn and anxious, and the shoulders bent over a little as he sat,--scarcely longer time than this was given them, when the Superintendent laid down his pen and said, sharply and decisively: "Well, gentlemen?" [Footnote 9: Col. William D. Kennedy, of the Tammany Regiment.] There was nothing very cordial in the tone, and no indication that the Superintendent considered it peculiarly his place to listen to all the persons who came to him upon business; but perhaps this comparative _brusquerie_ is necessary, in the carrying on of any important department, to discourage bores and send idle people the sooner about their business. It does not add to popularity, however, and may add materially to the opposite.