away, saying, "Dear me! I wouldn't see a
man hung for a thousand dollars."

I am weary of such hypocrisy, and I shall, in this paper, speak of some
executions I have witnessed.

I was quite a small boy, at school, when my chum and model, Bill
Everett, dragged me off to Wayland's Mill, to see old Mrs. Kitty White
suspended. She was a very infamous old woman, who had been in the habit
of kidnapping black children, and running them by night from the Eastern
shore across the bay to Virginia, where they were sold. If they became
noisy and obstreperous before they left her house, and suspicion fell
upon her, she clove their skulls with a hatchet, and buried them in her
garden. When finally discovered, the remains of nearly a score marked
how wholesale had been her wickedness.

This old woman was very drunk when she came to be hanged, and so was the
sheriff who assisted her. She called him impolite names, and carried a
pipe in her mouth, and went off smoking and cursing. I remember that I
cried very loudly, so that Bill Everett had to choke me, and saw ghosts
for so many nights succeeding, that Crouch, our maid of all work, had to
sit at my bedside till I fell asleep.

The atrocity of a crime makes great difference in one's desire to see
its after tragedy; and the next hanging I attended was almost
world-famed. Four men were suspended for shooting down an entire family
in cold blood. They had embarked on a raid of robbery, and emerging from
the barren scrub of Delaware Forest, fell upon a snug and secluded
Maryland farm-house, where the farmer's family were taking their supper.
They fired through the ruddy windows, and brought the man down at his
wife's feet; she, in turn, fell upon her threshold, rushing forth into
the darkness, and the remnant of the family perished except two boys,
who slipped away and gave the alarm.

The jailer's boys of Chestertown went to school with me, and I was
invited by the least of them to visit the jail,--a tumble-down old
structure with goggly windows, and so unsafe that the felons had to be
ironed to almost their own weight. And into the cell where the four
fiends were lying, the jailer's big boy, for a big joke, pushed me, and
locked the door upon me.

I was alone with the same bloody-handed men who had so recently, and for
a trifle of gold, made the fireside a shamble, and the night a howling
terror.

They appreciated the joke, and drew me to them, while their chains
clanked, and pre