r84 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



You are now a public lecturer. Worse things are in store for you. You will 

 be sent to Congress. Next, to the penitentiary. Finally, happiness will come 

 again — all will be well — you will be hanged." 



I was now in tears. It seemed hard enough to go to Congress ; but to be 

 hanged — this was too sad, too dreadful. The woman seemed surprised at my 

 grief. I told her the thoughts that were in my mind. Then she comforted me. 



" Why, man," * she said, " hold up your h&2A—you have nothing to grieve 

 about. Listen. You will live in New Hampshire. In your sharp need and 

 distress the Brown family will succor you — such of them as Pike the assassin 

 left alive. They will be benefactors to you. When you shall have grown fat 

 Upon their bounty, and are grateful and happy, you will desire to make some 

 modest return for these things, and so you will go to the house some night and 

 brain the whole family with an axe. You will rob the dead bodies of your 

 benefactors, and disburse your gains in riotous living among the rowdies and 

 courtesans of Boston. Then you will be arrested, tried, condemned to be 

 hanged, thrown into prison. Now is your happy day. You will be converted 

 — you will be converted just as soon as every effort to compass pardon, commu- 

 tation, or reprieve has failed — and then ! Why, then, every morning and every 



♦ In this paragraph the fortune-teller details the exact history of the Pike-Brown assassination 

 case in New Hampshire, from the succoring and saving of the stranger Pike by the Browns, to the 

 subsequent hanging and coffining of that treacherous miscreant. She adds nothing, invents nothing, 

 exaggerates nothing (see any New England paper for November l86g). This Pike-Brown case is 

 selected merely as a type, to illustrate a custom that prevails, not in New Hampshire alone, but in 

 every State in the union — I mean the sentimental custom of visiting, petting, glorifying, and snuffling 

 over murderers like'this Pike, from the day they enter the jail under sehtenceof death until they 

 swing from the gallows. The following extract 'from the Temple Bar (1866) reveals the fact that 

 this custom is not confined to the United States: — "On December 31st, 1841, a man named John 

 Johnes, a shoemaker, murdered his sweetheart, Mary Hallam, the daughter of a respectable laborer, 

 at Mansfield, in the county of Nottingham. He was executed on March 23d, 1842. He was a man 

 0f unsteady habits, and gave way to violent, fits of passion. The girl declined his addresses, and he 

 said if he did not have her no one else should. After he had inflicted the first wound, which was 

 not immediately fatal, she begged for her life, but seeing him resolved, asked for time to pray^ He 

 said that he would pray for both, and completed the crime. The wound? were inflicted by a 

 shoemaker's knife, and her throat was cut barbarously. After this he dropped on his knees some 

 time, and prayed God to have mercy on two unfortunate lovers. He made no attempt to escape, and 

 confessed the crime. After his imprisonment he behaved in the most decorous manner ; he won upon 

 the good opinion of the jail chaplain, and he was visited by the Bishop of Lincoln. It does not appear 

 that he expressed any contrition for the crime, but seemed to pass away with triumphant certainty 

 that he was going to rejoin his victim in heaven. He was visited by some pious and benevolent ladies 

 of Nottingham, some of whom declared he was a child of God, if ever there was' one. One of the ladies 

 sent him a white eamelia to wear at his execution!' 



