"We do not know the _penalty_, or if there be any, attached to the offense of _scolding_; but for the information of our Burke neighbours we would inform them that the late lamented and distinguished Judge Early decided, some years since, when a modern Xantippe was brought before him, that she should undergo the _punishment of lustration_ by immersion three several times in the _Oconee_. Accordingly she was confined to the tail of a cart, and, accompanied by the hooting of a mob, conducted to the river, where she was publicly ducked, in conformity with the sentence of the court. Should this punishment be accorded Mary Cammell, we hope, however, it may be attended with a more salutary effect than in the case we have just alluded to--the unruly subject of which, each time as she rose from the watery element, impiously exclaimed, with a ludicrous gravity of countenance, 'Glory to God.'" It is doubtful whether these Georgia duckings were done with a regularly constructed ducking-stool; the cart was probably run down into the water. One of the latest, and certainly the most notorious sentences to ducking was that of Mrs. Anne Royal, of Washington, D. C., almost in our own day. This extraordinary woman had lived through an eventful career in love and adventure; she had been stolen by the Indians when a child, and kept by them fifteen years; then she was married to Captain Royall, and taught to read and write. She traveled much, and wrote several vituperatively amusing books. She settled down upon Washington society as editor of a newspaper called the "Washington Paul Pry" and of another, the "Huntress"; and she soon terrorized the place. No one in public office was spared, either in personal or printed abuse, if any offense or neglect was given to her. A persistent lobbyist, she was shunned like the plague by all congressmen. John Quincy Adams called her an itinerant virago. She was arraigned as a common scold before Judge William Cranch, and he sentenced her to be ducked in the Potomac River. She was, however, released with a fine, and appears to us to-day to have been insane--possibly through over-humored temper. [Illustration: The Stocks.] III THE STOCKS One of the earliest institutions in every New England community was a pair of stocks. The first public building was a meeting-house, but often before any house of God was builded, the devil got his restraining engine. It was a true English punishment, and to a degree, a Scotch; and was of most ancient date. In the _Cambridge Trinity College Psalter_, an illuminated manuscript illustrating the manners of the twelfth century, may be seen the quaint pictures of two men sitting in stocks, while two others flout them. So essential to due order and government were the stocks that every village had them. Sometimes they were movable and often were kept in the church porch, a sober Sunday monitor. Shakespeare says in King Lear: "Fetch forth the stocks You stubborn ancient knave!"