when he hastened to retreat in an opposite direction. This was on Oct.
15; and from this moment the neighborhood was all alive with excitement,
and five or six hundred men undertook the pursuit.

It shows a more than Indian adroitness in Nat Turner to have escaped
capture any longer. The cave, the arms, the provisions, were found; and,
lying among them, the notched stick of this miserable Robinson Crusoe,
marked with five weary weeks and six days. But the man was gone. For ten
days more he concealed himself among the wheat-stacks on Mr. Francis's
plantation, and during this time was reduced almost to despair. Once he
decided to surrender himself, and walked by night within two miles of
Jerusalem before his purpose failed him. Three times he tried to get out
of that neighborhood, but in vain: travelling by day was of course out of
the question, and by night he found it impossible to elude the patrol.
Again and again, therefore, he returned to his hiding-place; and, during
his whole two months' liberty, never went five miles from the Cross Keys.
On the 25th of October, he was at last discovered by Mr. Francis as he
was emerging from a stack. A load of buckshot was instantly discharged at
him, twelve of which passed through his hat as he fell to the ground. He
escaped even then; but his pursuers were rapidly concentrating upon him,
and it is perfectly astonishing that he could have eluded them for five
days more.

On Sunday, Oct. 30, a man named Benjamin Phipps, going out for the first
time on patrol duty, was passing at noon a clearing in the woods where a
number of pine-trees had long since been felled. There was a motion among
their boughs; he stopped to watch it; and through a gap in the branches
he saw, emerging from a hole in the earth beneath, the face of Nat
Turner. Aiming his gun instantly, Phipps called on him to surrender. The
fugitive, exhausted with watching and privation, entangled in the