Josiah went to the Post-office, and I had a little tradin’ to do to the stores and the groceries. But Jonesville was all up in end, as you may say, and every place where I went to I could see that every man was rent with excitement to his very foundations.
A grocer man where we did our tradin’ had been burgled the night before. A poor man, a chair bottomer by trade, had stole a codfish weighin’ two pounds and a half, and a dozen of onions. He had tried to git work and couldn’t git a thing to do, so he was obleiged to follow his trade in a different way from what he wanted to follow it; and the consequence was, his family was perishin’ for food. And his wife havin’ the consumption thought she could eat a little codfish and onions if she had ’em. So, as he couldn’t get trusted for 22 cents he lay to and stole ’em. And Jonesville rose to a man in anger and wrath, I never see so big a excitement there, and Josiah said he never seen a excitement there or any where else, any where near the size of this. More’n a dozen told us the story before we had been in the grocery twenty minutes, for they was rampant to tell it.
They said: they got on the track of the codfish and onions early in the mornin’, tracked ’em to the haunt of the robber (he lived in a shanty on the age of the village) and tore the booty he had obtained by lawless rapine from his grasp. The grocer man that was rapined got back the biggest part of the codfish skin, and three of the onions. Though they said the robber’s pardner in iniquity tried to conceal her guilty treasure beneath the straw bolster, for she was sick abed, and didn’t know when she should ever get anything to eat again.
They said they demolished the straw bolster right there on the spot, in their righteous anger and as an example to the woman of the mighty power and justice of the law, and dragged the man off to jail of course. But they wasn’t satisfied with that, they wanted to make an example of him. The man he rapined came out boldly and said he ort to be masicreed right there in the streets. Says he, “What is the nation comin’ to, if thieves and robbers haint made public patterns and examplers of?”
An old man in a blue soldier overcoat who was tryin’ to get trusted for some plug tobacco said to the grocer man: “He ort to be guletined.”
But the grocer didn’t know what that meant; he thought the old man was kinder praisin’ him up, so he acted mad and wouldn’t trust him. But the one that seemed to talk the biggest about it was P. Cypher Bumpus. Bein’ a lawyer by trade, he has got well acquainted with some uncommon big words, and he naturally loves to let folks see on what familiar terms he is with ’em.
THE THIEF AT HOME.
He uses ’em like a master workman. He didn’t gesture a mite; they say he wont on common occasions. I’d give a cent though if he had been willin’ to, for I s’pose it is a sight worth goin’ miles to see. But he used words more’n three inches long, and I don’t know but some would have come nigh onto four inches in length, a goin’ on about this rapine.
“Yes,” says Cornelius Cork takin’ aim at us with his forefinger as if we was rabbits eatin’ his early cabbages. “Stealin’ is sunthin’ that Jonesville and the nation cannot and will not, put up with. And such villains and robbers will find out that we wont; fur frummit.”