Rhode Island American And Gazette

The Ruling Passion.—It happened on a certain time, at the assizes of an English county town, that among the prisoners tried and condemned, was one who was convicted of house breaking, and ordered to be executed. Part of the sentence was, that after he was dead, his body should be delivered to the surgeons for dissection.

When the day appointed for the execution came, the prisoner was brought out and hanged and in due time he was cut down, and, in conformity to the sentence, his body was delivered to a surgeon of the town for such anatomical operations as he might judge proper. The doctor bore off his prize in great glee; and having carried his body into his dissecting room for the purpose of trying some experiment on it, he stripped it naked, and put it into a warm bath. Having left the room a moment, the doctor was not a little surprised and startled on his return, to find his subject sitting upright in the bath, and staring wildly about the room. The man himself seemed equally surprised; but after a little while an eclaircissement took place. The doctor found on examination that the neck of his new patient had not been broken, and that the hanging having produced only a suspension of animation, he had been revived by the effects of the bath. On this unexpected emergency, the surgeon was not a little puzzled what to do—whether to deliver the reviving felon to the civil authorities and have him hanged over again to better purpose, or whether he should keep himself guiltless of a life which seemed to have been spared so providentially. At last, the doctor's good nature prevailed—and after demanding and receiving the most solemn assurance that he would leave the country immediately, renounce his wicked ways, and never again make free with the property of his neighbors, he suffered the house breaker to escape.

In less than a year, this same felon was arrested for some new depredation, tried, convicted, and again sentenced to death. When the kind-hearted surgeon, who had before spared his life, heard of this new conviction, his curiosity and benevolence impelled him to visit the prisoner. He inquired of him with the greatest earnestness how he could possibly have renewed his depredations after escaping so narrowly before, and in the face and eyes of his solemn protestations to renounce thieving forever? "Why, doctor," said the felon, "I was born a thief, and there is no fighting against nature;—to tell the truth, sir, on the occasion of our first acquaintance, when you entered the room and found me sitting upright in the bath, I was looking around to see what I could steal."