travellers, who have beguiled the midnight hour in the interesting
process of pulling down rail fences, to pry their carriages out of mud
holes, will have a respectful and mournful sympathy with our unfortunate
hero. We beg them to drop a silent tear, and pass on.

It was full late in the night when the carriage emerged, dripping
and bespattered, out of the creek, and stood at the door of a large
farmhouse.

It took no inconsiderable perseverance to arouse the inmates; but at
last the respectable proprietor appeared, and undid the door. He was a
great, tall, bristling Orson of a fellow, full six feet and some inches
in his stockings, and arrayed in a red flannel hunting-shirt. A very
heavy mat of sandy hair, in a decidedly tousled condition, and a beard
of some days' growth, gave the worthy man an appearance, to say the
least, not particularly prepossessing. He stood for a few minutes
holding the candle aloft, and blinking on our travellers with a dismal
and mystified expression that was truly ludicrous. It cost some effort
of our senator to induce him to comprehend the case fully; and while he
is doing his best at that, we shall give him a little introduction to
our readers.

Honest old John Van Trompe was once quite a considerable land-owner and
slave-owner in the State of Kentucky. Having "nothing of the bear about
him but the skin," and being gifted by nature with a great, honest, just
heart, quite equal to his gigantic frame, he had been for some years
witnessing with repressed uneasiness the workings of a system equally
bad for oppressor and oppressed. At last, one day, John's great heart
had swelled altogether too big to wear his bonds any longer; so he
just took his pocket-book out of his desk, and went over into Ohio, and