Alexandria Gazette

The Modern Style of "Punishment."

Even the gallows, around which the ribald crowd roars and surges, has become to a certain class of individuals simply a stage on which is to be enacted a euthanasy of a sublime and glorious character. Not content with attending the dying outlaw in his hour of final agony, and confirming, as far as man may, the hope which the penitent may have learned to cherish, there are too many clergymen who are not satisfied unless every doomed sinner leaves the world radiant and jubilant in the assurance that his end is rather that of a martyr than of a malefactor. His brain, as in the case Carswell who was hanged a day or two ago, is wrought into such a divine ecstacy that he thinks he hears the songs of Heaven and sees the angelic throng waiting to waft him to the realms above, and when the sight of the scaffold disturbs this happy vision his tremor is dulled by the administration of chloroform, in order that he may pass from earth without fear or doubt!—Balt. Gazette.