in their frenzy attack the City Hall to effect their purpose.  There was one building in the city, which the guardians of the law evidently agreed could resist the rage of the populace, and that building was the jail.  To this last stronghold of Puritan civilization the authorities and the powers that were, fell back as a dernier resort to save Garrison’s life.  But even in this utmost pitch and extremity, when law was trampled in the streets, when authority was a reed shaken in a storm, when anarchy had drowned order in the bosom of the town, the Anglo-Saxon passion for legal forms asserted itself.  The good man, hunted for his life, must forsooth be got into the only refuge which promised him security from his pursuers by a regular judicial commitment as a disturber of the peace.  Is there anything at once so pathetic and farcical in the Universal history of mobs?

Pathetic and farcical to be sure, but it was also well meant, and therefore we will not stop to quarrel with men who were equal to the perpetration of a legal fiction so full of the comedy and tragedy of civilized society.  But enough—­the municipal wiseacres having put their heads together and evolved the brilliant plan of committing the prophet as a disturber of the peace, immediately set about its execution, which developed in the sequence into a bird of altogether another color.  For a more perilous and desperate device to preserve Garrison’s life could not well have been hit upon.  How was he ever to be got out of the building and through that sea of ferocious faces surging and foaming around it.  First then by disguising his identity by sundry changes in his apparel.  He obtained a pair of trousers from one kindly soul, another gave him a coat, a third lent him a stock, a fourth furnished him a cap.  A hack was summoned and stationed at the south door, a posse of constables drew up and made an open way from the door to it.  Another hack was placed in readiness at the north door.  The hack at the south door was only a ruse to throw the mob off the scent of their prey, while he was got out of the north door and smuggled into the other hack.  Up to this point, the plan worked well, but the instant after Garrison had been smuggled into the hack he was identified by the mob, and then ensued a scene which defies description; no writer however skillful, may hope to reproduce it.  The rioters rushed madly upon the vehicle with the cry:  “Cut the traces!  Cut the reins!” They flung themselves upon the horses, hung upon the wheels, dashed open the doors, the driver the while belaboring their heads right and left with a powerful whip, which he also laid vigorously on the backs of his horses.  For a moment it looked as if a catastrophe was unavoidable, but the next saw the startled horses plunging at break-neck speed with the hack up Court street and the mob pursuing it with yells of baffled rage.  Then began a thrilling, a tremendous race for life and Leverett street jail.  The vehicle flew along Court street to Bodoin square,