492 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

CHAPTER LVI.
A QUESTION OF LAW.
THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and
so is the small jail (or ' calaboose ') which once stood in its neighbour-
hood. A citizen asked, e Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the
town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose ?'
Observe, now, how history becomes denied, through lapse of time
and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was noi
burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat>
of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combus-
tion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for
Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen ; he -wae
a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more
about his c*»se than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in tnafc
bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering
about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and
begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the
contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused
themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last,
some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying
it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition,
touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were
left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and tkea
hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and us-
buoyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested
and locked tip in the calaboose by the marshal—large name for a
constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning, the churek
bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course—I with i&e
rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously : he had set hia