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.]

STREAK THE FIRST.

* * * *

And now the sacred rite was done, and the marriage-knot was tied,
And Colt withdrew his blushing wife a little way aside;
"Let's