Portland Gazette, And Maine Advertiser

Serious Warning to Duellists.

A duel was fought a few days since in Cornwall, when both the combatants fell at the first fire!—a Catastrophe imputed to the extraordinary conduct of the second (for there was but one,) who assisted on the occasion. It seems the parties—a commercial ambassador from London, and a gentleman of the neighborhood, being "flush'd with the Tuscan grape and in high blood," quarrelled; and in the impatience of their valor, having no other arms at hand, proceeded to the work of death with a single musket. The toss of a dollar, which gave the first fire to one, fixed the other as his fatal mark. The single second, charged the musket; and in the act of delivering it, with elevated muzzle, purposely pulled the trigger, when both combatants fell—at the sound!—one over a precipice, the other into the mud; and the gentleman to whom we owe our account says, he left the former in charge of a nurse—the latter of a washer-woman! —[London paper.]