74 ORNITHOLOGICAL RAMBLES, 



conveyance of money from Washington for the payment 

 of troops about to be disbanded in the neighbourhood 

 of Watertown, at the close of the war. They had in 

 their employment one Spiggleman, and entrusted him 

 with a large sum in paper-money, which was packed at 

 Washington and delivered to him for conveyance to 

 Watertown. Spiggleman pretended that he had been 

 robbed, and showed the hole cut in his saddle-bags, 

 through which the parcel had been abstracted. Not 

 crediting his story, although he exhibited a very con- 

 siderable contusion on his head in corroboration, 

 Spraggs watched nightly at his residence, while 

 Fairbanks set off to Washington, and obtained from 

 the treasury a fac-simile of the parcel of bills entrusted 

 to Spiggleman. The hole cut in the saddle-bags was 

 found too small to have admitted the abstraction of the 

 parcel. The sureties, resolved to have back the money, 

 urged upon Spiggleman to give them, on some 

 pretence, a meeting at a retired place where there was 

 a marsh and a mud-pool full of water. Here the two 

 determined men laid hold of the miserable Spiggle- 

 man, and told him their suspicions, viz., * That unless 

 the money was restored they were both utterly ruined ; 

 that they had made up their minds to have the money 

 or his life. They might just as well be hung for his 

 death as incur the utter ruin and destitution of them- 

 selves and families. In short they were desperate.' 

 He vehemently protested his innocence ; but they 



