"Agreeably to public notice, the awful sentence of death was yesterday inflicted on J. Thompson Hare and John Alexander, in the presence of a vast concourse assembled to witness the ignominious ceremony. Their lives have expiated the crime for which they suffered. Justice has no demands on them in the grave.
"The gallows was sufficiently elevated above the walls of the prison to afford a distinct view of the unfortunate men to spectators at the distance of several hundred yards.
"Hare has made a confession which is now hawking about town for sale. In it he observes that, 'for the last fourteen years of my life I have been a robber, and have robbed on a large scale, and been more successful than any robber either in Europe or in this country that I ever heard of.'"
This lying dying boast of Hare fitly closes his evident failure as a highwayman.
An account of a negro highwayman is given in the _Federal Republican and Baltimore Telegraph_ of September 11, 1818.
[Illustration: Relay House, Mattapan Tavern.]
In the early years of this century there existed in eastern Massachusetts an organized band of thieves. It is said they were but one link in a chain of evil night-workers which, with a home or shelter in every community, reached from Cape Hatteras to Canada. This band was well organized, well trained, and well housed; it had skilful means of concealing stolen goods in innocent-faced cottages, in barns of honest thrift, and in wells and haystacks in simple dooryards. One mild-manered and humble house had a deep cellar which could be entered by an ingeniously hidden broad-side door in a woodshed; into this cave a stolen horse and wagon or a pursued load of cribbed goods might be driven, be shut in, and leave no outward sign. Other houses had secret cellars, a deep and wide one beneath a shallow, innocuous storage place for domestic potato and apple bins, and honest cider barrels. In a house sheltering one of these subterranean mysteries, a hard-working young woman was laboriously and discreetly washing clothes when surprised by the sheriff and his aids, who wisely invaded but fruitlessly searched the house. Nothing save the simplest household belongings was found in that abode of domesticity; but in later years, after the gang was scattered, a trap-door and ladder were found leading to the sub-cellar, and with chagrin and mortification the sheriff remembered that the woman's washing tubs stood unharmed upon the trap-door during the fruitless search.