Aram was traced to King's Lynn and arrested. Tried at York, he defended himself with extraordinary ability, but in vain, and was sentenced to death. Before his execution at York he confessed his part, and so to this sombre story we are at least spared the addition of a mystery and doubt of the justice of his sentence.
Hood's poem makes Aram, conscience-struck, declare his crime to one of his Lynn pupils, in the form of a horrible dream. How does it begin, that ghastly poem? Pleasantly enough—
"'Twas in the prime of summer time,
An evening calm and cool;
And four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school."
The Grammar School of those young bounders was pulled down and rebuilt many years ago, and so much of association lost.
"Pleasantly shone the setting sun
Over the town of Lynn,"
but Eugene Aram, the Usher, on this particular evening,
"Sat remote from all,
A melancholy man."
Presently, Hood tells us, he espied, apart from the romping boys, one who sat and "pored upon a book." This morbid youngster was reading the "Death of Abel," and Aram improved the occasion, and "talked with him of Cain." With such facilities for entering intimately into Cain's feelings of blood-guiltiness, he conjured up so many terrors that, if we read the trend of Hood's verses correctly, the boy thought there was more in this than the recital of some particularly vivid nightmare, and informed the authorities, with the well-known result—
"Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,
Through the cold and heavy mist,
And Eugene Aram walked between,
With gyves upon his wrist."
