THE BALLAD OF GRACE BROWN AND CHESTER GILLETTE
The dreams of the happy is finished,
The scores are brought in at last;
A jury has brought in its verdict,
The sentence on Gillette is passed.
Two mothers are weeping and praying;
One praying that justice be done,
The other one asking for'mercy,
Asking God to save her dear son.
All eyes are turned on the drama:
A-watching the press night and day,
A-reading those sweet pleading letters,
Wondering what Gillette would say.
He is now in State's Auburn dark prison
Where he soon will give up his young life,
Which might have been filled with sweet sunshine
Had he taken Grace Brown for his wife.
But Cupid was too strong for Gillette,
It was playing too strong with his heart,
For the one that had loved him so dearly,
Yet from her he wanted to part.
'Twas on a hot, sultry day in the summer
When the flowers were all aglow,
They started out on their vacation
For the lakes and the mountains to roam.
Did she think when he gathered those flowers
That grew on the shores of the lake
That the hand(s) that plucked those sweet lilies
Her own sweet life they would take?
They were seen on the clear, crystal waters
Of the beautiful Big Moose Lake,
And nobody thought he'd be guilty
Of the life of that poor girl to take.
It happened along in the evening,
Just at the close of the day,
With the one that had loved him so dearly
They drifted along on South Bay.
They were out of the view of the people
Where no one could hear her last call,
And nobody knows how it happened,
But Gillette and God knows it all.
Harold W. Thompson
from Body, Boots and Britches
Folktakes, Ballads and Speech from Country New York
There was a country New York when I was there, just beginning to be taken over by city people for their weekend hangout. What a lovely country it was. |
