And now the sun was going down, when, hark! a rifle’s crack!
Hush—hush! another strikes the air, and all their breath draw back,—
Then crashing on through bush and briar, the crowd from either side
Rush in to see whose rifle sure with blood the moss has dyed.
Weary with watching up and down, brave Lynch conceived a plan,
An artful dodge whereby to take at unawares his man;
He hung his hat upon a bush, and hid himself hard by;
Young Silas thought he had him fast, and at the hat let fly.
It fell; up sprang young Silas,—he hurled his gun away;
Lynch fixed him with his rifle, from the ambush where he lay.
The bullet pierced his manly breast—yet, valiant to the last,
Young Fixings drew his bowie-knife, and up his foxtail [64] cast.
With tottering step and glazing eye he cleared the space between,
And stabbed the air as stabs in grim Macbeth the younger Kean:
Brave Lynch received him with a bang that stretched him on the ground,
Then sat himself serenely down till all the crowd drew round.
They hailed him with triumphant cheers—in him each loafer saw
The bearing bold that could uphold the majesty of law;
And, raising him aloft, they bore him homewards at his ease,—
That noble judge, whose daring hand enforced his own decrees.
They buried Silas Fixings in the hollow where he fell,
And gum-trees wave above his grave—that tree he loved so well;
And the ’coons sit chattering o’er him when the nights are long and damp;
But he sleeps well in that lonely dell, the Dreary ’Possum Swamp.
The American’s Apostrophe to Boz.
[So rapidly does oblivion do its work nowadays that the burst of amiable indignation with which America received the issue of his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit is now almost wholly forgotten. Not content with waging a universal rivalry in the piracy of the Notes, Columbia showered upon its author the riches of its own choice vocabulary of abuse; while some of her more fiery spirits threw out playful hints as to the propriety of gouging the “stranger,” and furnishing him with a permanent suit of tar and feathers, in the then very improbable event of his paying them a second visit. The perusal of these animated expressions of free opinion suggested the following lines, which those who remember Boz’s book, and the festivities with which he was all but hunted to death, will at once understand. The object aimed at was to do justice to the bitterness and “immortal hate” of these thin-skinned sons of freedom. Happily the storm passed over: Dickens paid, in 1867-68, a second visit to the States, was well received, made a not inconsiderable fortune by his Readings there, and confessed that he had judged his American hosts harshly on his former visit.]
Sneak across the wide Atlantic, worthless London’s puling child,
Better that its waves should bear thee, than the land thou hast reviled;
Better in the stifling cabin, on the sofa thou shouldst lie,
Sickening as the fetid nigger bears the greens and bacon by;