Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/56

256 duced. Colvin gazed upon the chains, and asked, ' What is that for?' Stephen answered, 'Because they say I murdered you.' 'You never hurt me,' replied Colvin."

The sequel is quickly told. The chains of Stephen Boorn were stricken off, and he became a free man. Jesse Boorn was liberated from prison. Russell Colvin returned to his friend, Mr. Polhamus, in New Jersey. But Judge Chace, who suffered an innocent man to be convicted of murder by the admission of extrajudicial confessions —the jury who deliberated but one hour before uttering a verdict of guilty upon evidence that should not hang a dog—the deacons, church-members, pious women, and dolorous devotees who were preaching repentance and urging confession of a crime upon a man innocent as themselves —and the ninety-seven members of the Legislature, sitting as a Court of Appeals, who refused rehearing of evidence and reversal of sentence upon grounds that would have disgraced the Westminster Hall decisions in the reign of the second James—what became of them?

Lord Mansfield laid down the rule of confessions as follows: "A free and voluntary confession is deserving of the highest credit, because it is presumed to flow from the strongest sense of guilt, and therefore it is admitted as proof of the crime to which it refers; but a confession forced from the mind by the flattery of hope or the torture of fear comes in so questionable a shape when it is to be considered the evidence of guilt that no credit ought to be given to it."

Apply this rule to the confession forced by what a Vermont Calvinistic preacher called "Hell's terrors on the naked conscience" out of Jesse Boorn. Apply it to that wheedled out of Stephen Boorn. Apply it to the confessions of witchcraft made in the seventeenth century by respectable citizens of Massachusetts, as given by Cotton Mather in the "Magnolia;" to those extorted by the rack and thumb-screw in the days of Queen Mary; to the hideously inconsistent statements of the victims of auto da fé, and to the scared utterances of personal guilt, mingled with petitions for mercy, of the miserable victims of Lynch Law!

O winds, that ripple the long grass,

O winds, that kiss the jeweled sea,

Grow still and lingering as you pass

About this laurel - tree!

The mountain knew you in the cloud

That turbans his dark brow; the sweet,

Cool rivers; and the woods that bowed

Before your pinions fleet.

With meadow-scents your breath is rife;

With cedar-odors, and with pine:

Now pause, and thrill with twofold life

Each spicy leaf I twine