Bent and bloody was the bowie
Which he held within his grasp;
And he seemed so much exhausted
That he scarce had strength to gasp—
“Gouge him, Bryant! darn ye, gouge him!
Gouge him while he’s on the shore!”
Bryant’s thumbs were straightway buried
Where no thumbs had pierced before.
Right from out their bony sockets
Did he scoop the monstrous balls;
And, with one convulsive shudder,
Dead the Snapping Turtle falls!
* * * * *
“Post the tin, sagacious Tyler!”
But the old experienced file,
Leering first at Clay and Webster,
Answered, with a quiet smile—
“Since you dragged the ’tarnal crittur
From the bottom of the ponds,
Here’s the hundred dollars due you,
All in Pennsylvanian Bonds!” [44]
The Lay of Mr Colt.
[The story of Mr Colt, of which our Lay contains merely the sequel, is this: A New York printer, of the name of Adams, had the effrontery to call upon him one day for payment of an account, which the independent Colt settled by cutting his creditor’s head to fragments with an axe. He then packed his body in a box, and sprinkling it with salt, despatched it to a packet bound for New Orleans. Suspicions having been excited, he was seized and tried before Judge Kent. The trial is, perhaps, the most disgraceful upon the records of any country. The ruffian’s mistress was produced in court, and examined, in disgusting detail, as to her connection with Colt, and his movements during the days and nights succeeding the murder. The head of the murdered man was bandied to and fro in the court, handed up to the jury, and commented on by witnesses and counsel; and to crown the horrors of the whole proceeding, the wretch’s own counsel, a Mr Emmet, commencing the defence with a cool admission that his client took the life of Adams, and following it up by a detail of the whole circumstances of this most brutal murder in the first person, as though he himself had been the murderer, ended by telling the jury, that his client was “entitled to the sympathy of a jury of his country,” as “a young man just entering into life, whose prospects, probably, have been permanently blasted.” Colt was found guilty; but a variety of exceptions were taken to the charge by the judge, and after a long series of appeals, which occupied more than a year from the date of conviction, the sentence of death was ratified by Governor Seward. The rest of Colt’s story is told in our ballad.]