It twice happened during our stay with her, that dead bodies were found partially concealed near it.

The circumstance was related as a sort of half hour's wonder; and when I asked particulars of those who, on one occasion, brought the tale, the reply was, "Oh, he was murdered I expect; or maybe he died of the canal fever; but they say he had marks of being throttled." No inquest was summoned; and certainly no more sensation was produced by the occurrence than if a sheep had been found in the same predicament.
The abundance of food and the scarcity of hanging were also favourite topics, as proving their superiority to England.

They are both excellent things, but I do not admit the inference.
A wide and most fertile territory, as yet but thinly inhabited, may easily be made to yield abundant food for its population: and where a desperate villain knows, that when he has made his town or his village "too hot to hold him," he has nothing to do but to travel a few miles west, and be sure of finding plenty of beef and whiskey, with no danger that the law shall follow him, it is not extraordinary that executions should be rare.
Once during our residence at Cincinnati, a murderer of uncommon atrocity was taken, tried, convicted, and condemned to death.
It had been shewn on his trial, that some years before he had murdered a wife and child at New Orleans, but little notice had been taken of it at the time.

The crime which had now thrown him into the hands of justice was the recent murder of a second wife, and the chief evidence against him was his own son.
The day of his execution was fixed, and the sensation produced was so great from the strangeness of the occurrence, (no white man having ever been executed at Cincinnati,) that persons from sixty miles' distance came to be present at it.
Meanwhile some unco' good people began to start doubts as to the righteousness of hanging a man, and made application to the Governor of the State* of Ohio, to commute the sentence into imprisonment.

The Governor for some time refused to interfere with the sentence of the tribunal before which he had been tried; but at length, frightened at the unusual situation in which he found himself, he yielded to the importunity of the Presbyterian party who had assailed him, and sent off an order to the sheriff accordingly.