Some years ago a man was apprehended in Hampshire, charged with a capital offence—­sheep-stealing, I believe.  After being examined before a justice of the peace, he was committed to the county jail at Winchester for trial at the ensuing assizes.  The evidence against the man was too strong to admit of any doubt of his guilt; he was consequently convicted, and sentence of death—­rigidly enforced for this crime at the period alluded to—­pronounced.  Months and years passed away, but no warrant for his execution arrived.  In the interval a marked improvement in the man’s conduct and bearing became apparent.  His natural abilities were good, his temper mild, and his general desire to please attracted the attention and engaged the confidence of the governor of the prison, who at length employed him as a domestic servant; and such was his reliance on his integrity that he even employed him in executing commissions, not only in the city, but to places at a great distance from it.  After a considerable lapse of time, however, the awful instrument, which had been inadvertently concealed among other papers, was discovered, and at once forwarded to the high-sheriff, and by the proper authority to the unfortunate delinquent himself.  My purpose is brief relation only; suffice it to say, the unhappy man is stated under these affecting circumstances to have suffered the last penalty of the law.—­Notes and Queries.

THE SEA-KINGS OF NANTUCKET.

Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two-thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s.  For the sea is his—­he owns it as emperors own empires, other seamen having but a right to pass through it.  Merchant-ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless sea itself.  The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business; which a Noah’s flood would scarcely interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.  He lives on the sea as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves; he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps.  For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an earthsman.  With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows, so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.—­Herman Melville’s The Whale.