Page:John Brown (1899).pdf/132

 matter, as I know but little abont your crops. I should like to know more as soon as I can."

"The girls," who had been of immense service, who kept discreet watch over the prattling conspirators in the house and hustled them out of sight on occasion, and who turned aside local suspicion by their sweet and honest ways, went home early in October. Meantime scenes of extraordinary strangeness were enacting at and around the Kennedy place. Eighteen or twenty men, mostly white, with three or four colored, were packed away there. They played checkers, sang sentimental songs, studied military books, put their large stock of weapons into order, and argued much and volubly on religious questions. Brown conducted some form of rdigious worship every day, though his adherents were mostly free thinkers. There was a little congregation of Dunkers, or Winebrennarians, who held meetings in a