HUNG TO A BALLOON.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 249, 11 October 1876, Page 4

HUNG TO A BALLOON.

That wide district of America known to French geographers as le Farwest, has, Bays the Daily News of June 20, "lately witnessed an imposing exercise of public justice; the sufferer from Lynch law was a person of the name of Diggles, whose punishment was as striking and severe as hia crime — the murder of a child — was nefarious. Diggles according to the Figaro, had been condemned by a jury of his countrymen, aud was being led by them, and by any other citizens who happened to have a spare half-hour, to tha usual place of execution. On the road the public-spirited jury chanced to encounter some amateurs of another sort of spectacle, who were engaged in the business of starting a balloon. The happy thought of combining the aeronautic science with the avenging of public morality at once occurred to some fertile mind, and Diggles was was made fast by a noose round his neck to the car of the balloon. The word, 'Let go,' was then given, and Diggles ascended into tbe firmament, his struggles testifying to the disagreeable nature of his position. After the death of Diggles the really imposing part of this form of execution began. The balloon, urged by contrary winds, was unable to descend to the earth, and the natives of le Farwest were enabled to cultivate their moral faculties by studying through telescopes the appalling fate that overtook the carcase of Diggles. The birds of the air gathered together, pursued the balloon, and feasted on the frame of the malefactor. Thiß terrible sight far outdid the most energetic attempts of Victor Hugo and of Francoys Villon to invent and de-st-ribe the repulsive penalty of crime. Villon is content with observing in prophetic anticipation of his own doom, 'Birds are busy about my face, and bave feathered their nests with my beard aud hair;' and Victor Hugo in L'Homrae Qui Kit, has done his best with a gallows, and with ravenß. But the floating and fearful gibbet that bore through the fields and folds of air, and pure spaces of cloud and sky, the rejected corpse of Digglee, is a practical proof that the Anglo-Saxon genius of le Farwest can easily outdo the imaginary flights of Gallic fancy. The subject ia a proper one for romantic and alliterative poetry, aod can only be briefly indicated in the kind of fustian that De Quincy invented and called impassioned prose. The author of * The Leper' might make something that would cause a new sort of shudder out of Diggles and his doom."