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hooked that basket of eels! [Rustling appreciation of the jest
among the jury.] If a squirming, twisting, winding, wriggling eel,
gentlemen, can be said at any given moment to have a back, we may
distinguish this new-found species as the greenback eel. It is a common
saying that no man can hold an eel and remain a Christian. I should like
to have viewed the pious equanimity of this good man when he laid his
hands on that whole bed of eels. In 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