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happy, barefoot boyhood, gentlemen, we used to find mud-turtles marked with initials or devices cut in their shells; but what must have been our friend's surprise to find, in the muddy bed of Harlow's Creek, eels marked with a steel-engraving of the landing of Columbus and the signature of the Register of the Treasury! I hear that a corporation is now being formed by the title of The Harlow's Creek Greenback National Bank-bill Eel-fishing Company, to follow up, with seines and spears, our worthy friend's discovery! I learn that the news of this rich placer has spread to the golden mountains of the West, and that the exhausted intellects which have been reduced to such names for their mines as 'The Tombstone,' 'The Red Dog,' the 'Mrs. E. J. Parkhurst,' are likely now to flood us with prospectuses of the 'Eel Mine,' 'The Flat Eel,' 'The Double Eel,' and then, when they get ready to burst upon confiding friends, 'The Consolidated Eels.'"
It takes but little to make a school or a court-room laugh, and the speech had appeared to give a good deal of amusement to the listeners.
To all?
Did it amuse that man who sat, with folded arms, harsh and rigid, at the dock? Did it divert that white-faced woman, cowering in a corner, listening as in a dream?
The judge now charged the jury briefly. It was unnecessary for him, he said, to recapitulate evidence of so simple a character. The chief question for the jury was as to the credibility of the witnesses. If the witnesses for the prosecution were truthful and were not mistaken, the inference of guilt seemed inevitable; this the defendant's counsel had conceded. The defendant had proved a good reputation; upon that point there was only this to be said: that, while such evidence was entitled to weight, yet, on the other hand, crimes involving a breach of trust could, from their very nature, be committed only by persons whose good reputations secured them positions of trust.
The jury-room had evidently not been furnished by a ring. It had a long table for debate, twelve hard chairs for repose, twelve spittoons for luxury, and a clock.
The jury sat in silence for a few moments, as old Captain Nourse, who had them in his keeping, and eyed them as if he was afraid that he might lose one of them in a crack and be held accountable on his bond, rattled away at the unruly lock. Looking at them then, you would have seen faces all of a New England cast but one. There was a tall, powerful negro called George Washington, a man well known in this county town, to which he had come, as driftwood from the storm of war, in '65. Some of the "boys" had heard him, in a great prayer-meeting in Washington--a city which he always spoke of as his "namesake"--at the time of the great review, say, in his strong voice, with that pathetic quaver in it: "Like as de parched an' weary traveller hangs his harp upon de winder, an' sighs for oysters in de desert, so I longs to res' my soul an' my foot in Mass'-chusetts;" and they were so delighted with him that they invited him on the spot to go home with them, and took up a collection to pay his fare; and so he was a public character. As for his occupation,--when the census-taker, with a wink to the boys in the store, had asked him what it was, he had said, in that same odd tone: "Putties up glass a little--whitewashes a little--" and, when the man had made a show of writing all that down, "preaches a little." He might have said, "preaches a big," for you could hear him half a mile away.
The foreman was a retired sea-captain. "Good cap'n--Cap'n Thomas," one of his neighbors had said of him. "Allers gits good ships--never hez to go huntin' 'round for a vessel. But it is astonishin' what differences they is! Now there 's Cap'n A. K. P. Bassett, down to the West Harbor. You let it git 'round that Cap'n A. K. P. is goin' off on a Chiny voyage, and you 'll see half a dozen old shays to once-t, hitched all along his fence of an arternoon, and wimmen inside the house, to git Cap'n A. K. P. to take their boys. But you let Cap'n Thomas give out that he wants boys, and he hez to glean 'em--from the poor-house, and from step-mothers, and where he can: the women knows! Still," he added, "Cap'n Thomas 's a good cap'n. I've nothin' to say ag'in him. He's smart!"
"Gentlemen," said the foreman, when the officer, at last, had securely locked them in, "shall we go through the formality of a ballot? If