And then the humble poor may come In that far distant day, And from the felon's nameless grave Will brush the leaves away: And gray old men will point the spot Beneath the pine tree's shade, As children ask with streaming eyes Where old John Brown was laid." Before he was executed many threatening communications were received by the Virginia State and Jefferson County officers. Large numbers of E. C. Stedman's poem, entitled "John Brown of Ossawattamie," were scattered about Charlestown. One stanza reads as follows: "But Virginians! Don't do it, for I tell you that the flagon, Filled with blood of Old Brown's offspring, was first poured by Southern hands; And each drop from Old Brown's life veins, like the red gore of the dragon, May spring up, a vengeful Fury, hissing through your slave-worn lands; And Old Brown, Ossowattamie Brown, May trouble you more than ever, When you've nailed his coffin down." Whether they be from the North or the South, fair-minded men, who are thoroughly conversant with the history of this raid, can hardly cherish any doubt concerning the turpitude of the invasion, the fairness of Brown's trial and the justice of his conviction and execution. He fell under the direction of a misguided conscience. The noble endowment that philosophers call conscience that gives its verdicts as to the moral merit or demerit of actions and affections, was strangely warped in Brown's intense and brave character. The possession of this faculty of conscience is the massive foundation of all human responsibility. Illustrations of the moral enormities that a perverted conscience can perpetrate are manifold along the pages of sacred and secular history. When Jesus looked down the aisles of the future, He said to His disciples that the men who would finally transfigure them into martyrs would murder them in the belief that they were rendering acceptable service to God. Paul declared that he regarded himself as meeting the divine approval when he was persecuting and murdering the primitive Christians. When the officers of the Spanish Inquisition saw the agonies of the victims who refused to renounce their religious creeds they joyfully exclaimed, "Let God be glorified." Charles the Ninth of France said he was conscientious in ordering the Saint Bartholomew massacre that resulted in the murder in French cities of tens of thousands of Christian Hugenots. The Bloody Queen, Mary Tudor, said she had a pure conscience when she sent to the scaffold the learned and gentle young Ex-Queen Lady Jane Grey. Thousands of criminals have sheltered their crimes in the temple of Conscience.