“I remember it, Nat,” I said. “But not because it has anything to do with the sameness of boyhood in different generations. I remember it for what happened to you afterward—what you got for it.” Nathan sighed. We paced a long way in silence. It was not hard to recall the rear-tragic events of that afternoon and their aftermath. II We caught Nathan duly as the Castilian spy, and made him “surrender his papers.” A court-martial passed fatal judgment upon him. He was led out beneath one of the trees in Mrs. Fairbank’s orchard and ordered to mount “the scaffold”, a dilapidated barrel. Around a high limb I succeeded in tying one end of a rope. It had a slip noose at its dangling end about eight feet from the ground. After much perspiration I got this noose over Nathan’s head. “There’s too much slack in it,” the condemned man suggested, anxious that there should be no bungle in the ceremony to spoil the grandeur. “When I’m hung, my feet’ll touch the ground and then I won’t be! You better slip it further down, Billy—under my arms or round my waist.” Rather than reclimb the tree and retie the rope, I conceded. A little French boy named Beauchamp was commissioned to kick away the barrel and “send the miserable felon to the wrath of a jealous God.” We had somewhere heard it phrased so. Rolland Beauchamp played his part perfectly. In fact, the whole execution was a bit too perfect. On a frenzied run our mothers started for that orchard when from under the biggest, highest tree began the wildest and most horrible howling that ever disturbed the quiet of pastoral Vermont. The spy, on being hung, had thought better of his fate. It wasn’t a bit of fun to be hung. Yet one could not altogether blame him. Never was a spy hung as our spy was hung. I had slipped the noose too far down Nathan’s body. When the barrel went out, the upper half of his torso outweighed his legs. He was whipped upside down in a twinkling and hung there ignominiously, kicking wildly ’twixt terra firma and the stars. This in itself wouldn’t have been so distressing if he had not been suspended in a slipnoose. The more he kicked and bellowed the sharper it tightened. “We tried to hang him!” cried the terrified little French boy. “Tried!” wailed a wrathful mother when she beheld her offspring suspended upside down, just out of reach. “We could get him down with a ladder, if we only had one!” volunteered the small Mayo boy who had been responsible for all this brilliant business. “Mr. Simpson’s got one, a mile down the river. I tell you what!” he suggested enthusiastically to Mrs. Forge, “you come and ask my mother if I can hitch up our horse and I’ll go after it! I could make it in less’n an hour an’ not half try!”