They flap above the dead.”
THE EXECUTIONER.
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BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR.
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Those who, day by day, glance carelessly over a newspaper, as they puff a cigar, or give relish to a lazy breakfast, by running the eye over the brief sketches of crime which appear in the morning journals, with so much regularity, and in such equal proportions, that we are almost led to conjecture that each day receives by lot its due share of such matter, seldom, if ever, think of the actual romance of the events which come to them in such a barren shape. How many broken hearts and peculiar agonies are involved in the intimate details of that arrest, the narrative of which appears among twenty others, and is so told, that, perhaps, the only impression which it makes upon the mind is one of wonder at the feats of the police. What a fearful stage in the history of some human spirit is following the publication of that hasty but remorseless paragraph, which may scarcely arrest the attention as we trace the columns down for more stimulating news, and yet, first, perhaps, publicly connects an honorable name with low vice, and removes the last motive to reform with the last hope of concealment. It is well for those of gentle sensibilities that fancy is not more discursive at such moments, and that, by a kind law of our natures, the door of sympathy seldom opens but to intrusive griefs.
In spite, however, of the callousness which the monotony of crime induces, and which ranges, increasingly, down from those who read of it with indifference to those who commit with composure, it is sometimes brought so near to us in all its bleak reality of depravity and affliction, that we cannot well avoid communion with its voices. There are those who consider emotional culture a duty of self-education, and who would have us, upon systematic principle, subject ourselves to frequent contact with guilt and its results. This doctrine may be carried to excess; and yet but few can say that experience has not proved that the impressions of an occasional intimacy with life’s deep tragedies around us are salutary and instructive.
I had stopped for the night, on a journey westward, at the little town of ——. I was to leave it again in half an hour, and in this short interval that remained before the coach would arrive which was to carry me on my way, I was comfortably seated by a table in my own private apartment, alternately sipping from a cup of coffee and searching for some item of interest in the columns of a dull weekly, still damp from the village press. My eye passed hastily over the stereotype remarks of the country editor, the absurd extravagance of its political articles, and the unmeaning gossip of the neighborhood, and rested, at last, with somewhat more interest, upon a paragraph which, under conspicuous capitals and innumerable marks of exclamation, had been thrust into the paper at the last moment. It contained the announcement of a robbery of the United States mail, from the confusion and empty verbiage of which I extracted these brief facts. The mail had been attacked, just before dawn, by two ill-looking men, who deliberately dragged the driver from his seat, tied him to a tree, and then, without further violence to his person, proceeded to rifle the bags. This done, they had fled, leaving the open letters scattered in the road, and the driver still bound. There was nothing, to be sure, very extraordinary in all this, except that it had occurred but a few hours before, and within two or three miles of where I sat. But when, soon after, the servant came in, and, eager to convey such unusual news, informed me that the men had been hotly pursued and taken, and were then in close custody in one of the rooms of that very house, on their way to the county prison, my curiosity, I confess, was fairly roused.
Intensity of character is always interesting, whatever may be its tendency. Profound intellectuality and abandoned villainy are, perhaps, equally attractive, when viewed in the light of mere food for speculation. Our deepest feelings discover themselves in our intercourse with the eccentric traits of those of our own species. It is seldom the fear of the elements, or of wild beasts, with which we frighten children and distress ourselves. It is the terror of strong men, of mad men, or of dead men, that is, at all times, most natural and most urgent. There is subject for deep reason and earnest philosophy in these leadings of a wayward nature.