December 2, John Brown started on his last journey. He sat upon his coffin in a wagon and as the two horses paced slowly from jail to gallows, he looked far afield, over river and valley and hill, and said: "This _is_ a beautiful country." He was sure he was upon the threshold of a far more beautiful country. The gallows were guarded by a militia company from Richmond, Virginia. In its ranks, rifle on shoulder, stood Wilkes Booth, a dark and sinister figure, who was to win eternal infamy by assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Beside the militia was a trim lot of cadets, the fine boys of the Virginia Military Institute. With them was their professor, Thomas J. Jackson, "Stonewall" Jackson, one of the heroic figures upon the Southern side of our Civil War. When the end came, Stonewall Jackson's lips moved with a prayer for John Brown's soul; Colonel Washington's and Mr. Strong's eyes were wet; and Tom Strong sobbed aloud. Albany fired a hundred guns in John Brown's honor as he hung from the gallows. In 1859 United States troops captured him that he might die. In 1899 United States troops fired a volley of honor over his grave in North Elba that the memory of him might live. Victor Hugo called him "an apostle and a hero." Emerson dubbed him "saint." Oswald Garrison Villard closes his fine biography of John Brown with these words: "Wherever there is battling against injustice and oppression, the Charlestown gallows that became a cross will help men to live and die." CHAPTER II OUR WAR WITH MEXICO--KIT CARSON AND HIS LAWYER, ABE LINCOLN--TOM GOES TO LINCOLN'S INAUGURATION--S. F. B. MORSE, INVENTOR OF THE TELEGRAPH--TOM BACK IN WASHINGTON. In 1846, Mr. Strong, long enough out of Yale to have begun business and to have married, had heard his country's call and had helped her fight her unjust war with Mexico. General Grant, who saw his first fighting in this war and who fought well, says of it in his Memoirs that it was "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." Much more important things were happening here then than the Mexican War. In 1846 Elias Howe invented the sewing-machine. In 1847 Robert Hoe invented the rotary printing press. Great inventions like these are the real milestones of the path of progress.