ARREST OF THE DEAD.

    The United States Gazette says:—­

“While the papers from the south and the west are bringing back to us the report from Mr. Degrand’s paper of the attachment of a dead body in Boston, the Eastern papers are bringing us assurances of the total illegality of any such act, and a contradiction of some of the important parts of Mr. Degrand’s tale of horror.  At the time of the first appearance of this story in our city, a gentleman of information assured the public through the medium of our columns that any such act was unlawful.  The Salem Gazette appears to think that no act of the kind was ever lawful in Massachusetts.  The Boston Courier states that in Feb., 1812, the legislature of Massachusetts passed a law making it highly penal for any civil officer to take the body of any deceased person, and the writer who furnishes this information says that ’he never heard that any such act of barbarism was ever attempted in that Commonwealth,’ but that the law was enacted to guard against the possibility of such an occurrence, by a mistake in the application of the terms, ’we command you to take the body of A.B.’ &c.

“This writer undoubtedly knows better than we both the laws and customs of his own state.  But we have some recollections of an event of this nature transpiring in the southeastern part of Massachusetts.  If we have not forgotten the events (or remembered some that never took place), a Sheriff in Barnstable county, we think in Brewster or Dennis, attached the body of a deceased debtor on its way to the grave, about the year 1811.  A circumstance that fixes this event the more firmly in our mind is that it transpired about this season of the year, the time of the gubernatorial election in that State, and was used as a subject of reproach to one of the political parties; and we incline to believe that this act, or, if it never took place, the report of it (for it was talked of), gave rise to the law mentioned in the Courier.

“It is proper, in concluding these remarks, to state that to attach a dead body in Massachusetts is now against the law; and if the act ever took place which is detailed by Mr. Degrand, it was done by the advice of an ignorant attorney.”

    We are enabled to give an accurate statement of the event to which
    the editor of the U.S.  Gazette above alludes; we copy it from a
    publication made at the time:—­

“On the 20th October, 1811, Capt.  Chillingsworth Foster, jun., AEt. about 41 years, departed this life; on the same day Benjamin Bangs, Esq., of Harwich, with one Mr. Scotto Berry, of the same place, called at the house of the deceased for payment of a sum of about one hundred and thirty dollars, due said Bangs, and requested the father of the deceased to give him his security, said Bangs well knowing the parent to be in low circumstances, and about seventy-five