to pity, in any other region, to behold him as he stood in the doorway,
stupidly watching the scene, while the big tears were slowly gathering
in his eyes, and falling down his bronzed and furrowed cheeks. The
rough, hard, unscrupulous man can always weep for himself. Whatever the
demerits of the rogue, our young traveller above stairs, would have
regarded him as the victim of a too sharp justice. Not so the
participators in the outrage. They had been too frequently the losers by
the cunning practice of the pedler, to doubt for a moment the perfect
propriety--nay, the very moderate measure--of that wild justice which
they were dealing out to his misdeeds. And with this even, they were not
satisfied. As the perishable calicoes roared up and went down in the
flames, as the pans and pots and cups melted away in the furnace heat,
and the painted faces of the wooden clocks, glared out like those of
John Rogers at the stake, enveloped in fire, the cries of the crowd were
mingled in with a rude, wild chorus, in which the pedler was made to
understand that he stood himself in a peril almost as great as his
consuming chattels. It was the famous ballad of the _regulators_ that he
heard, and it smote his heart with a consciousness of his personal
danger that made him shiver in his shoes. The uncouth doggrel, recited
in a lilting sort of measure, the peculiar and various pleasures of a
canter upon a pine rail. It was clear that the mob were by no means
satisfied with the small measure of sport which they had enjoyed. A
single verse of this savage ditty will suffice for the present, rolled
out upon the air, from fifty voices, the very boys and negroes joining
in the chorus, and making it tell terribly to the senses of the
threatened person. First one voice would warble

"Did you ever, ever, ever!"--

and there was a brief pause, at the end of which the crowd joined in