"If your shoes pinch," replied Judge Lynch, "you'll very soon have ease; I'll give you satisfaction, squire, in any way you please; What are your weapons?--knife or gun?--at both I'm pretty spry!"; "Oh! 'tarnal death, you're spry, you are?" quoth Silas; "so am I!" Hard by the town a forest stands, dark with the shades of time, And they have sought that forest dark at morning's early prime; Lynch, backed by Nehemiah Dodge, and Silas with a friend, And half the town in glee came down to see that contest's end. They led their men two miles apart, they measured out the ground; A belt of that vast wood it was, they notched the trees around; Into the tangled brake they turned them off, and neither knew Where he should seek his wagered foe, how get him into view. With stealthy tread, and stooping head, from tree to tree they passed, They crept beneath the crackling furze, they held their rifles fast: Hour passed on hour, the noonday sun smote fiercely down, but yet No sound to the expectant crowd proclaimed that they had met. And now the sun was going down, when, hark! a rifle's crack! Hush--hush! another strikes the air, and all their breath draw back,-- Then crashing on through bush and briar, the crowd from either side Rush in to see whose rifle sure with blood the moss has dyed. Weary with watching up and down, brave Lynch conceived a plan, An artful dodge whereby to take at unawares his man; He hung his hat upon a bush, and hid himself hard by; Young Silas thought he had him fast, and at the hat let fly. It fell; up sprang young Silas,--he hurled his gun away; Lynch fixed him with his rifle, from the ambush where he lay. The bullet pierced his manly breast--yet, valiant to the last, Young Fixings drew his bowie-knife, and up his foxtail {64} cast. With tottering step and glazing eye he cleared the space between, And stabbed the air as stabs in grim Macbeth the younger Kean: Brave Lynch received him with a bang that stretched him on the ground, Then sat himself serenely down till all the crowd drew round. They hailed him with triumphant cheers--in him each loafer saw The bearing bold that could uphold the majesty of law; And, raising him aloft, they bore him homewards at his ease,-- That noble judge, whose daring hand enforced his own decrees. They buried Silas Fixings in the hollow where he fell, And gum-trees wave above his grave--that tree he loved so well; And the 'coons sit chattering o'er him when the nights are long and damp; But he sleeps well in that lonely dell, the Dreary 'Possum Swamp. The American's Apostrophe to Boz.