hout ending, to aggravate his misery. Before he
died, he had gnawed his shoulder from very hunger. On the fifth night,
as it approached twelve o'clock, having been motionless for hours,
his guards believed him to be dead, and, tired of their horrid duty,
proposed to return home. In order, however, to be sure, they sent one of
the party up the ladder to feel if his heart still beat. He had ascended
into the tree, when a shriek, unlike anything human, broke upon the
stillness of the night, and echoed from the neighboring wood with
redoubled power. The poor fellow dropped from the tree like a dead man,
and his companions fled in terror from the spot. When day encouraged
them to return, their victim was swinging stiffly in the north wind--now
lifeless as the companion of his crime and its punishment. It is
believed, to this day, that no mortal power, operating upon the lungs of
the dead murderer, produced that awful, unearthly, and startling scream;
but that it was the voice of the Evil One, warning the intrusive guard
not to disturb the fiend in the possession of his lawful victim; a belief
materially strengthened by a fact that could not be disputed--the limb
upon which the robbers hung, after suffering double pollution from
them and their master's touch, never budded again; it died from that
hour; the poison gradually communicated to the remaining branches, till,
from a flourishing tree, it became a sapless and blasted trunk, and so
stood for years, at once an emblem and a monument of the murderers' fate.

"Fagan was never buried; his body hung upon its gibbet till the winds
picked the flesh from off his bones, and they fell asunder by their own
weight. A friend of mine has seen his horrid countenance, as it
hung festering and blackening in the wind, and remembers, by way of
amusement, between schools, pelting the body with stones. The old trunk
has disappeared, but the spot is still haunted in the belief of the
people of the neighborhood, and he is a bold man who dare risk a
nocturnal encounter with the bloody Fagan, instead of avoiding the
direct road, at the expense of half a mile's additional walk. No
persuasion or force will induce a horse _raised in the neighborhood_ to
pass the fated spot at _night_, although he will express no uneasiness
by daylight. The inference is, that the animals, as we know animals
_do_, and Balaam's certainly _did_, see more than their masters. A
skeptical gentleman, near, thinks this only