offer something irreconcileable to ordinary minds, but gives to the humorous large means with which to feast their love of the ludicrous.  On the scaffold of destruction, our good brothers of the clergy would, pointing to the “awful example,” assure the motley assembly gathered beneath, that he hath purified that soul, which will surely be accepted in heaven; but, he can in no wise condescend to let it, still directing the flesh, live on the less pure platform of earth.  With eager eyes, the mass beneath him, their morbid appetites curiously distended, heed not the good admonition; nay, the curious wait in breathless suspense the launching a human being into eternity; the vicious are busy in crime the while; the heedless make gay the holiday.  Sum up the invention and perpetration of crime beneath the gallows on one of those singular gala-days, and the culprit expiating his guilt at the rope’s end, as an “awful warning,” will indeed have disclosed a shallow mockery.  Taking this view of the hanging question, though we would deprive no man of his enjoyment, we deem it highly improper that our hero should die by any other means than that which the chivalrous sons of the south declared “actually necessary.”

But before proceeding further with Nicholas, it may be proper here to state that Annette and the stranger, in whose hands we left her, have arrived safe at New York.  Maxwell-for such is his name-is with his uncle engaged in a lucrative commercial business; while Annette, for reasons we shall hereafter explain, instead of forthwith seeking the arms of an affectionate mother, is being educated at a female seminary in a village situated on the left bank of the Hudson River.

In returning to Nicholas, the reader will remember that Grabguy was something of a philosopher, the all-important functions of which medium he invoked on the occasion of his ejectment from Fetter’s court, for an interference which might at that moment have been taken as evidence of repentance.  The truth, however, was, that Grabguy, in the exercise of his philosophy, found the cash value of his slave about to be obliterated by the carrying out of Fetter’s awful sentence.  Here there rose that strange complexity which the physical action and mental force of slave property, acting in contrariety, so often produce.  The physical of the slave was very valuable, and could be made to yield; but the mental being all powerful to oppose, completely annulled the monetary worth.  But by allowing the lacerations to heal, sending him to New Orleans, and making a positive sale, some thousand or twelve hundred dollars might be saved; whereas, did Fetter’s judgment take effect, Mr. Grabguy must content himself with the state’s more humble award of two hundred dollars, less the trouble of getting.  In this democratic perplexity did our economical alderman find himself placed, when, again invoking his philosophy-not in virtue of any sympathetic admonition, for sympathy was not of Grabguy-he soon