Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 June 1884 — In the Stocks. [ARTICLE]

In the Stocks.

It is useful as well as amiable in the best of man to know how to enter into the feelings of the worst. Humanity, as well as the spirit of adventure, has sometimes made curious attempts to cultivate that sort of knowledge, and sometimes the experiments have been very amusing. Lord Camden, walking one day with his friend, Lord Dacre, through an English village, passed near the parish stocks and stopped to comment on the probable measure of suffering endured by culprits confined in that “penal machine.”

“ I don’t believe there is any physical pain in such a punishment,” says Judge Camden. “There is the humiliation, of course, but unless the rabble pelt the prisoner with brick-bats, the rest is nothing. ” “ Suppose you try it, and settle your doubts," answered Dacre. “I’ll do it!” exclaimed the Judge, and in a trice he was sitting on the ground with his feet fifteen inches above the level of his seat, and his ankles encircled by the hard wood. “Now, Dacre,” said he, "fasten the bolts and leave me for ten minutes. ”

Lord Dacre complied and left him, intending to saunter along the lane and return in ten minutes. But unfortunately he was an absent-minded man, and falling into one of his reveries as he walked, he forgot the stocks and his imprisoned friend.

In the meantime the Chief-Justice went through every torture of an agonizing punishment acute shootings along the confined limbs, aching in the feet, angry pulsations under the toes, violent cramps in the muscles and thighs, gnawing pain at the point where his person came in contact with the cold ground, pins and needles everywhere. Faintness, fever, giddiness, and raging thirst added their torments to his physical discomfort. He implored a peasant to liberate him, but the fellow answered with a shout of derision. He hailed a passing clergyman, and explained that he was not a culprit, but Lord Camden, Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas; but the clergyman passed on, muttering to himself, “Mad! mad with liquor! Droll, though, that a in the stocks should fancy himself a Chief-Justice!”

A farmer’s wife jogged by, and hearing him cry out that he was dying of thirst, gave him a juicy apple. She was the only one who showed him any pity. Everybody who saw him supposed the law was taking its course. The unhappy Judge sat there in the stocks, not “ten minutes,” but ten hours—and never mortal man more bitterly repented of a sportive freak than did he. No matter how he was released, or how he came to a settlement with Lord Dacre, but a circumstance some time afterward showed that he remembered his sufferings. At a trial in a suit for wrongful conviction and confinement in the stocks, he was on the bench. The plaintiff described the pain he had endured while undergoing his -unjust punishment, and the opposing counsel laughed at his statements. Lord Camden leaned forward and turned the lawyer’s merriment by asking him in a whisper: “Brother, were you ever in the stocks?” “Never, my lord,” said the astonished man. “Well, I have been there,” whispered the Chief-Justice, “and let me tell you, the agony is awful. ”