account says, "seems to have been rather glib on
the tongue," was indicted, tried, convicted and punished for scolding,
by being publicly ducked in the Oconee River. The editor adds:
"Numerous spectators attended the execution of the sentence." Eight
years later the Grand Jury of Burke County, of the same state, presented
Mary Cammell as a "common scold and disturber of the peacable
inhabitants of the County." The _Augusta Chronicle_ says this of the
indictment:

"We do not know the _penalty_, or if there be any, attached to the
offense of _scolding_; but for the information of our Burke neighbours
we would inform them that the late lamented and distinguished Judge
Early decided, some years since, when a modern Xantippe was brought
before him, that she should undergo the _punishment of lustration_ by
immersion three several times in the _Oconee_. Accordingly she was
confined to the tail of a cart, and, accompanied by the hooting of a
mob, conducted to the river, where she was publicly ducked, in
conformity with the sentence of the court. Should this punishment be
accorded Mary Cammell, we hope, however, it may be attended with a more
salutary effect than in the case we have just alluded to--the unruly
subject of which, each time as she rose from the watery element,
impiously exclaimed, with a ludicrous gravity of countenance, 'Glory to
God.'"

It is doubtful whether these Georgia duckings were done with a regularly
constructed ducking-stool; the cart was probably run down into the
water.

One of the latest, and certainly the most notorious sentences to ducking
was that of Mrs. Anne Royal, of Washington, D. C., almost in our own
day. This extraordinary woman had lived through an eventful career in
love and adventure; she had been stolen by the Indians when a child, and
kept by them fifteen years; then she was married to Captain Royall, and
taught to read and write. She traveled much, and wrote several
vituperatively amusing books. She settled down upon Washington society
as editor of a newspaper called the "Washington Paul Pry" and of
another, the "Huntress"; and she soon terrorized the place. No one in
public office was spared, either in personal or printed abuse, if any
offense or neglect was given to her. A persistent lobbyist, she was
shunned like the plague by all congressmen. John Quincy Adams called her
an itinerant virago. She was arraigned as a common scold before Judge
William Cranch, and he sentenced her