Monroe Tavern, Lexington, Massachusetts.
He was executed in December and behaved with great propriety and sobriety. He showed neither cant, levity, nor bravado. He prayed silently just before his death, professed penitence, and went to the gallows with composure. He arranged his dress and hair carefully before a glass, showed a kind disposition to all, and finally gave the signal himself for the drop. A tall and handsome scamp, with piercing blue eyes and fine complexion, his marked intelligence and sweetness of expression made him most attractive. His frame was perfect in symmetry, and he was wonderful in his strength and endurance—truly an ideal highwayman; it must have been a pleasure to meet him.
Thus it is very evident that neither highway robbery nor highwaymen thrived in America. They mended their ways very promptly—and apparently they wanted to. A very striking example of this is in the American career of Captain Thunderbolt, the friend and teacher of Mike Martin. When he set foot on American soil, he tamely abandoned all his old picturesque wicked ways. He settled first in Dummerston, Vermont, where he taught school and passed his leisure hours in seclusion and study. He then set up as a physician, in Newfane, Vermont, calling himself Dr. Wilson, and he moved from thence to Brattleboro, where his house stood on the present site of the railroad station. He married the daughter of a prominent Brattleboro farmer, but was too stern and reserved to prove a good American husband. He lived to be about sixty-five years old, and had a good and lucrative professional practice.
I know two authentic cases of highway robbery of stage-coaches in New England; one was from the driver, of a large sum of money which had been entrusted to him. It was his wife who stole it. She was not prosecuted, for she returned the money, and it was believed she would not have taken it from any one else. The other theft was that of a bonnet. Just as a stage was to start off from a tavern door, a woman jumped on the step, seized the bonnet of a woman passenger, tore it from her head, and made off with it before the outraged traveller’s shrieks could reach the driver and stop the coach; and—as the chronicler solemnly recounted to me—the robber was never heard of more. These two highwaywomen have the honors of the road.
It may be deemed somewhat grandiloquent to term to-day this theft of a bonnet “highway robbery”; but I can assure you a fine bonnet was a most respected belonging in olden times, and if of real Dunstable or fine Leghorn straw and trimmed with real ostrich plumes it might be also a costly belonging, and to steal it was no light matter—indeed it was a hanging matter. For in Boston, when John Hancock was governor, a woman was hanged for snatching a bonnet from another’s head and running off with it.
CHAPTER XIX
TAVERN GHOSTS