shed from room to room in
a state of frenzy. With the dying flames her own vitality subsided, and
she was dead before the ash-piles were cool. I say it seriously when I
say that these are facts of which there is authentic proof.

If the woman had recovered, she would have fared badly, even at that
late period, had she been in Salem; but the death-penalty has never
been hastily inflicted in Portsmouth. The first execution that ever took
place there was that of Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny, for the murder
of an infant in 1739. The sheriff was Thomas Packer, the same official
who, twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of
Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton
in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The following
stanzas, however, give the pith of the story--

"And a voice among them shouted,
"Pause before the deed is done;
We have asked reprieve and pardon
For the poor misguided one.'

"But these words of Sheriff Packer
Rang above the swelling noise:
'Must I wait and lose my dinner?
Draw away the cart, my boys!'

"Nearer came the sound and louder,
Till a steed with panting breath,
From its sides the white foam dripping,
Halted at the scene of death;

"And a messenger alighted,
Crying to the crowd, 'Make way!
This I bear to Sheriff Packer;
'Tis a pardon for Ruth Blay!'"

But of course he arrived too late--the Law led Mercy about twenty
minutes. The crowd dispersed, horror-stricken; but it assembled again
that night before the sheriff's domicile and expressed its indignation
in groans. His effigy, hanged on a miniature gallows, was afterwards
paraded through the streets.

"Be the name of Thomas Packer
A reproach forevermore!"

Laighton's ballad reminds me of that Portsmouth has been prolific in
poets, one of whom, at least, has left a mouthful of perennial rhyme for
orators--Jonathan Sewell with his

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours."

I have somewhere seen a volume with the alliterative title of "Poets of
Portsmouth," in which are embalmed no fewer than sixty immortals!

But to drop into prose again, and have done with this iliad of odds and
ends. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first
re