But of course he arrived too late--the Law led Mercy about twenty minutes. The crowd dispersed, horror-stricken; but it assembled again that night before the sheriff’s domicile and expressed its indignation in groans. His effigy, hanged on a miniature gallows, was afterwards paraded through the streets. “Be the name of Thomas Packer A reproach forevermore!” Laighton’s ballad reminds me of that Portsmouth has been prolific in poets, one of whom, at least, has left a mouthful of perennial rhyme for orators--Jonathan Sewell with his “No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, But the whole boundless continent is yours.” I have somewhere seen a volume with the alliterative title of “Poets of Portsmouth,” in which are embalmed no fewer than sixty immortals! But to drop into prose again, and have done with this iliad of odds and ends. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse--though not in connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed. The building was completed and tenanted in 1716. Seven years later, an act was passed in England authorizing the establishment of parish workhouses there. The first and only keeper of the Portsmouth almshouse up to 1750 was a woman--Rebecca Austin. Speaking of first things, we are told by Mr. Nathaniel Adams, in his “Annals of Portsmouth,” that on the 20th of April, 1761, Mr. John Stavers began running a stage from that town to Boston. The carriage was a two-horse curricle, wide enough to accommodate three passengers. The fare was thirteen shillings and sixpence sterling per head. The curricle was presently superseded by a series of fat yellow coaches, one of which--nearly a century later, and long after that pleasant mode of travel had fallen obsolete--was the cause of much mental tribulation (1. Some idle reader here and there may possibly recall the burning of the old stage-coach in The Story of a Bad Boy.) to the writer of this chronicle.