SELECT POETRY.

Patea Mail, 9 October 1880, Page 5 (Supplement)

SELECT POETRY.

' BILL GIBBON’S DELIVERANCE. r,Y ARTHUR MATTHISON. 7ever heerd tell o’ Bill Gibbon ? Why yer’ve kinder been out of existence, teion’t believe some on you’d think, If it warn’t for a little assistance. ain’t ‘ over smart ’ not myself; Well, who said I was—what’s it matter . ’o know Bill was, I guess, kinder cute, So let’s have no more o’ that chatter.

‘ What did he do ?’ well—l’m darned ! If yer won’t, pretty soon, raise my dander; For yer ought to know Bill just as well As the geese on the pond knows the gander

Wal, there, you needn’t get riled. Smooth your feathers back, steady, Ihj tell, mates — Tell yer one of his feats of the woods, A braver deed never befell mates —

In Winconsin’s big forests, one day, _ We was makin’ a clearin’ in Fall time ; And the thing as Bill Gibbon done then, I, for one, shall remember for all time.

A broad-shouldered coon was old Bill, With a will, like his muscles, of iron ; He’d a’ tackeled a buffalo bull, And at choppin’—well, warn’t he a spry

It was choppin’ as brought it about, boys, For Bill had begun on a whopper, A two-hnndred foot mighty pine, As was doomed to sure death by Ins chopper.

We’d all on us stopp’d, work was done; He’d finish, ‘ dog-gorncd if ho wouldn t. An’ we quit him, all full of our chair, An’ laughin’ and sayin’ he couldn’t.

Ho buried his axe in the tree; We set off for our cabin, us others. * I’ll kill him afore eight!’ he cries, ‘Him, and p’raps one or two of ins brothers !’

On the floor of his hut ‘afore eight ’ He lay, as he told us all, gasping, How it happ’d—his voice broke, His rough big brown hand my own grasp-

Fast and strong fell his strokes on the tree, It sway’d, an’ it crack’d, an’ it quiver d, It toppled, it fell! —then says he _ As he spoke, why, we all on us shiver d

‘I struck the last blow with such force, That the tree in a second was timber, And I fell to the earth, just as stiff As the minute before I’d been limber.

‘ Swoop upon mo the giant tree crash tl ! Fiercely fell on my right leg and broke it! An’ it seem’d to shriek out for revenge, Bevemre ! just as if it had spoken it.

‘ Help !’ I cried, but a long hour had gone Since I’d seen you boys homewards all file off, , , , . And a bugle’s voifcc woulcln t been heard, in them thick woods and bushes a mile off.

‘ T couldn’t lie there all night, So I made up my mind in a second I mow’d as the leg must come oil, So, to do it myself ! best, I reckon’d.

* )nc stroke ! what was left of the leg Was freed from the tree and its branccs ! And what poor Bill Gibbon then said, Why, the thought of it now my cheek blanches.

My heart knocks aloud at my ribs, Though I ain’t in the leastways white livered! When I think what he did on that night, By his right hand he was deliver’d.

He tried with a pluck, all his own, _ To crawl, inch by inch to his cabin : Though each move he made on the road Was, we’d most on us think, just like stabbin’..

When he found as he couldn’t get on, Because his two legs wasn’t equal,A bold thought comes into his head As you’ll see when 1 tell you the sequel.

A word and a blow ’twas with Bill, He’d act on a thought soon as catch it, His right leg was oil', his axe gleamed. And he cut off his left leg to match it.

He sturderly stumped to his hut, A glass of hot rum quick he mixes; ‘ Overcome !’—there’s not one of us speaks As his torn limbs we splices and fixes !

* A stout constitooshun !’ Well, yes ; A hero, too, birth, bone, and breeding. What’s that you say out there, How ho did fur to stop all the bleeding ?

Oh, didn’t I mention it ? That’s odd ! ’Bout them limbs as was torn into ribbons; Wal, yer see, didn’t matter to him, 'jQioy was wooden legs, mates, was Bill Gibbon’s!

OUTLAWRY. The ‘Syduey Mail,’ in answer to a correspond ont writing upon the question as to whether the bushranger Kelly could be legally executed without a trial, or hether any person killing him would be liable to prosecution, says;—‘We take from ‘Stephen on Blackstone ’ the following extract bearing on the subject of outlawry : —‘ An outlawry for treason or felony amounts to a conviction and attainder of the offence as much as if the offender had been found guilty by his country. His life is, however, still under the protection of the law ; so that though anciently an outlawed felon was said to have caput lupinum, and might be knocked on the head by any one who should meet him ; because, having renounced all law, he was to be dealt with as in a state of nature, when everyone that should find him might slay him; yet now, to avoid such inhumanity, it is holden that no man is entitled to kill him wontonly or wilfully, but in so doing is guilty of murder, unless it happens in the endeavour to apprehend him : for any person may arrest an outlaw on a criminal prosecution either of his own hand or by writ or warrant of capias vtlayatam in order to bring him to be dealt with according to law.’ This passage clearly shows that any one shooting Kelly now would be guilty of murder, even without the accidental circumstauce of his outlawry having expired before the day of his arrest. Besides, the very fact of the accused being tried shows that the outlawry which involves conviction and attainder is no longer in force, otherwise the present expensive proceedings would be merely farcical. The decree of outlawry would have to be suspended before Kelly could bo legally tried, if it had not expired before his apprehension, and hence lie is now assumed to be innocent until proved guilty, being in exactly the same position as if he had surrendered himself or been arrested before the decree of outlawry was issued.

NEGRO CONVICTS IN AMERICA. The following account of how negro convicts arc treated in the United States may perhaps prove interesting to Mr. Bright and other admirers of American institutions.

‘ The most revolting accounts, says the ‘ New York Tribune,’ ‘ reach us from both public and private sources of the condition, as summer advances, of the negro convicts employed upon the railways in the South. Those poor wretches are let out to contractors at so much a month. They are let at a very low sum indeed, much less than the contractor would have hired them for when they were slaves. Then, their owner would have taken care that he had the proper interest for the money he had invested in them, and would have taken care, too, that they were not worked, beaten, or starved to death. Unfortunately, the State which hires them now has no money invested in them, and it is to its interest, as well as the contractors’, that the largest amount of work shall be got out of them, and that the cost of keeping th em shall be pushed down to as low a notch as possible. The sickness or death involves no loss to anybody. The supply of convicts for public works is easily kept up. Negroes have been sentenced for life in Georgia for stealing a pair of chickens ; while a sentence of years is common for any trifling theft. When the wretched darkey is once chained and at work, whose interest it is to remember that his sentence has expired ? Not the contractor’s nor the State’s, assuredly. When once fairly at work, too, the cruelty of his treatment surpasses anything known in the days of slavery. The gangs are kept upon starvation diet; they are housed in stockades or prison cars, which in filth and foul air equal the underground pens of Audersonville and Salisbury. They died last summer by the hundreds of typhoid and cholera morbus, and nobody was the wiser. The armed guards, usually white convicts, shoot them at their own discretion-on the first sign of insubordination, and are responsible to nobody. The ‘ dead nigger’—a black lump of flesh, of whom neither law nor man takes cognisance, nobody, in fact, but his God—is dropped into a hole dug by the side of the road where the gang is at work, and that is the end of it.’

A KING IN A FIX. Kossuth tells us of a strange mistake made by some religious fanatics in England, who presented the King of Sardinia, whilst on a visit here, an address congratulating him on having abjured the Homan Catholic religion and renounced his allegiance to the Pope. ‘I was staying at that time in England. The Queen, the Government, and the people showed much sympathy with the young King. But Ido not believe that this royal visit had any influence on the future of the Italian question. We witnessed, however, several amusing scenes. It known in England that the Government of King Victor Emmanuel was engaged in a fierce struggle with the Vatican, The English had also heard that, in consequence of the closing of some hundreds of monasteries, and the subjection of the priests to common law, Turin had been banned with papal excommunication, which, though much dreaded at one time, has long‘since ceased to bo injurious, Some of the English people, earnest Protestants, thought they saw in Victor Emmanuel, if not another Luther, at least another Moritz of Saxony. And when the King travelled as far as the Tweed, more than one religious assemblage read to him a handsomely illuminated address, strongly abusive of the ‘Great Babylon,’ praising the King, to his amazement, as a great reformer, and encouraging him to persevere in the good work. It cost him some trouble to make these people understand that, though a great friend to toleration in religious matters, and to liberty and equality before the law, he was at the same time a good Eoman Catholic, and intended to remain one to the end of his days. It is a real delight to see how thorougly impracticable are, at times, my dear practical English friends, whom I so much respect and love, and to whom I owe such a debt of gratitude.

AN UNINVITED BALLOONIST.

By F. Blake Croftox.

It once struck me that ballooning would be the pleasantest way of travelling in my business, lifting me above the sands, beasts, and barbarians of the desert. So I had a big balloon constructed, with a patent rudder, guaranteed to stand against any ordinary wind. One day when the breeze blew inland, I embarked, _ thinking my return voyage would be plain-sailing, owing to the patent rudder and to the figuring of a man of science, who proved quite clearly that an upper current of air set steadily from the desert to the western ocean. But cither the upper current of air or the patent rudder went all wrong, and I was landed at Morocco, from which city I made my way home by sea, with the loss of four months’ time, my whole cargo of feathers, and every cent I had taken out with me.

For the future, I confined my ballooning to short voyages of exploration. On one of these occasions, my supply of water had nearly run out, when noticing a stream, as I thought, I descended and made fast the balloon. What I fancied was a brook turned out, however, to be a wady — that is, one of the dried-up water-courses of the Sahara. As I turned back emptyhanded, I saw a prettily-spotted animal, which proved to be a baby-leopard, playing like a kitten in the wady. I caught the creature and hoisted it into tlie car by a rope. Then, as no living thing was in sight, I was leisurely preparing to launch my airship once more. Two of the three ropes which secured it to the earth were already cut, and I was turning to cut the third, when I was horrified at seeing the mother-leopard weeping towards me noiselessly, but swiftly, and with a revengeful gleam in her eyes. The infuriated beast was now barely forty feet away, and I had enough presence of mind left to lose no time in cutting the last rope. The liberated balloon rose majestically in the air—about a second too late. While I was severing the rope, the leopard had reduced her distance, and when I had finished she was poised for a spring. Up she bounded, the embodiment of cruelty and grace, her paws outstretched, her tail still’, her jaws distended, her eyes Hashing. Her fore claws only just reached the bottom of the rising car; but they grasped, it like grim death, and she soon clambered into the car, nearly capsizing it in the process. Thou she stood a moment over her sprawling cub and gave a roar, whether a roar of greeting to the cub or of menace to me I did not even try to guess. Just at that time, I was going up the ropes which secured the car to the balloon, in a way that would have won the prize at any gymnastic exhibition.

In a few seconds I was clinging to the netting of the balloon, and glancing uneasily down at the * bearded pard. ’ A glance showed me there was no immediate danger from the leopard. She was quite as alarmed as I was. Her first movement, when the perceived the earth receding beneath her, was to seize her cub in her teeth and hasten to the edge of the car, as if about to spring to the ground. But the hejght was too great, and abandoning her intention, she dropped the cub and whined in abject terror. I had now time to reflect. Even if I wished to make the balloon descend, in the hope that the frightened leopard might leap to the ground at the first opportunity, I had not the means of doing so where I was. To go down into the car while the leopard remained there alive, seemed like putting my head in a lion’s mouth, and I had no means of killing the beast, for my fire-arms were also in the car. Meantime, though I had secured a foothold in the netting, the strain on the muscles of my hands and arms was great, and I could not support it for ever. At last I drew my knife, which, in my hurry, I had luckily shoved into my pocket unclasped, and, climbing around the base of the balloon, began severing the ropes which attached the car to it. As the car swung downward, supported by the last two ropes, the young leopard fell to earth; but its mother, becoming suddenly conscious of what I was doing, sprang upward and struggled hard to climb the single rope that remained uncut—for the other, half severed, had yielded when she sprang. It was a trying moment, but the knife was sharp and I managed to divide the rope in time. Down fell the car, and the leopard after it, still grasping the rope with her claws. Sometimes the car was uppermost, sometimes the beast. In spite of my own perilous position, I could not help watching this terrific sea-saw in the air, until beast and car, after shrinking to mere specs, were dashed to pieces on the ground. Fortunately for me, my eyes were accustomed to dizzy heights.

I had provided against the too rapid ascent of the balloon, when lightened of so great a weight, by cutting a small hole in its side. But this proved insufficient to stop its upward progress. So I made two other small holes with great caution for my only chance of a successful descent was to let the gas escape by slow degrees. My task was not an easy one, for the balloon, cut loose from its ballast, now lay over considerably on one side, with me beneath. The strain on my hands had consequently grown much greater. However, I eased it somewhat by getting one leg inside the netting, and soon I was glad to perceive, from the gently upward direction of the loose ropes, that I was beginning to descend. The motion grew more and more rapid, and •though I managed to reduce its rapidity for a time by cutting off all the swinging ropes within my reach, I should probably have been maimed, or killed outright, had I not alighted on the long, feathery leaves of a date-palm, in the centre of a beautiful cluster of these trees. After refreshing myself with some dates, and tilling my pockets with more, I struck into the desert to seek the wreck of the car, and especially my rifle and revolver, without which I had no hopes of reaching civili; ation again. My ruined balloon did me a last service, as it limped over the tops of the palms : it enabled me to tell the direction of the wind, which I could not have discovered otherwise, for it was nearly dead calm. By going directly against the wind, I krew I must draw near the objects of my search. I found the shattered car and the leopard by it; but rifle and pistol were bent and broken beyond any possibility of use and repair,— ‘ St. Nicholas, ’,