"So ole Derrick Molleston, Aunt Braner, asked you about my dinner, did he? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the black people licked the kidnappers at Cowgill House?"

"Dat dey did, praise de Lord!" ejaculated Aunt Braner, fervently.

Clayton turned to a young man at the table, now dressed in a good clean suit of clothes, and said, as the old cook left the room:

"Now, friend Dennis, tell your tale. Goy!"

The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:

"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last night. Maybe they's gone before this. My boat was hired to take 'em off, and I had to come along, but I run away from the band and give warnin' last night to Mr. Clayton yer."

Before the Judge could reply, Clayton exclaimed,

"Now, Brother Custis, permit me now! Let my noble old constituent and fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"

"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House - where I am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes the name among them of 'Kind Parke' - I found several of our free Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William Parke, contrary to law, has been selling thee brandy out of an eggshell, as if he knew not the contents, I shall pay him to repeat the vile enticement quickly, for ye who are of the world must fight this night.'"

"Goy!" said Clayton, warming up; "Quakers will set other people on, won't they? Goy!"

"Other gunpowder arms were there procured, and we barricaded Cowgill House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns, and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical defensive position - is that the vain term? - to send a volley out the main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of the black boys gagged him. Then the attack was made, and, at my order, all the lights were put out."