Listen.
--[In this paragraph the fortune-teller details the exact history of the
Pike-Brown assassination case in New Hampshire, from the succoring and
saving of the stranger Pike by the Browns, to the subsequent hanging and
coffining of that treacherous miscreant. She adds nothing, invents
nothing, exaggerates nothing (see any New England paper for November,
1869). This Pike-Brown case is selected merely as a type, to illustrate
a custom that prevails, not in New Hampshire alone, but in every state in
the Union--I mean the sentimental custom of visiting, petting,
glorifying, and snuffling over murderers like this Pike, from the day
they enter the jail under sentence of death until they swing from the
gallows. The following extract from the Temple Bar (1866) reveals the
fact that this custom is not confined to the United States.--"on December
31, 1841, a man named John Johnes, a shoemaker, murdered his sweetheart,
Mary Hallam, the daughter of a respectable laborer, at Mansfield, in the
county of Nottingham. He was executed on March 23, 1842.
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