The drunken tramp--mentioned in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huck Finn"-- who was burned up in the village jail, lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward and filled them with hideous dreams--dreams in which I saw his appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window-bars, with the red hell glowing behind him--a face which seemed to say to me, "If you had not give me the matches, this would not have happened; you are responsible for my death." I was _not_ responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches; but no matter, mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience, and knew but the one duty--to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions; particularly when there was no sense or reason in it.

The tramp--who was to blame--suffered ten minutes; I, who was not to blame, suffered three months.
The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street[10] at noonday supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture--the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man's breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles.

We are curiously made.

In all the throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism, and swifter in its atrocious work.

In my nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night.
All within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other tragedies, and I had the ill-luck to be too near by on each occasion.
There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for some small offence; I saw him die.