and hospitable, accepted this explanation without suspicion. The men looked honest and respectable, and spoke well and frankly. Brown hired a farm-house and cabin, called the Kennedy place, in a retired situation amidst the woods about four miles from the Potomac. They took up their residence on this place. Martha Brown, the wife of young Oliver Brown, and Anne, John Brown's daughter, now sixteen years old, came on to keep house for them. The neighborhood people visited them occasionally, and found nothing suspicious about them. But meantime Brown, little by little, was, with consummate cleverness, getting his boxes of rifles and pikes and other munitions down from Chambersburg, partly by wagon and partly by rail, and storing them in the cabin.
Stearns and Sanborn and Gerrit Smith did not know that he was doing these things nor where he was going to strike. They did not want to know what he was
