BLOOD AGAIN.
Last week has been unusually fertile in savagery. Of course the occurrence of the assizes revives the wretched blood-chronicle of the last six months in all our minds; but independently of this we have a crop of fresh horrors. We have just had another case as bad as that of the infamous Mrs. Greenacre, in the person of a schoolmistress who was doing her best to torture to death a wretched little girl whom she had adopted, from what other motive than a good one, in the first instance, one cannot see. She seems to have revelled in the spectacle of the poor creature’s sufferings. We must not soil our pages with full details of the case; but when the child was exhibited at the Southwark Police Court, it bore upon its body such marks of violence, that every one present shuddered at the sight. There was nothing to suggest insanity as a palliation of the prisoner’s brutality. We are left to the conclusion, that a woman may be of sane mind, and yet feel a kind of sensual gratification in the agony of a child. The other day a coroner killed himself on his wedding-tour. The other day, too, a ruffian of the name of Foley was brought up at the Bow Street office charged with having committed a series of the most savage assaults on his wife and daughters—the youngest daughter, a child nine years of age, he had literally thrown on the fire. John Fenton has just been hung for the Walkeringham murder, and a gentleman who was present at the execution hung himself next morning. The number of the “Times” for Monday of last week (August 6th), contains such a catalogue of murders and attempts at murder, that it is clear enough our civilisation is not worth so very much. The first of these was tried at Carlisle before Baron Martin. George Cass was charged with the murder of Ann Sewell at Embleham on the 26th of March last, and substantially convicted on his own confession. We would invite particular attention to this confession, inasmuch as it gives some little insight into the clumsy workings of the ruffian’s mind. Here is the autobiography of George Cass at the only interesting period of his brutal life. The fellow’s intelligence is obviously scarce higher than that of a bullock. He thinks as much of the three halfpence out of which Sarah Dixon cheated him when he sent her for the ’bacco, as he does of the blood he had spilt. How differently a fashionable novelist would have dealt with the phenomena of the murderer’s mind! As far as our own recollection extends, this document is what collectors of bric-à-brac would call unique, and certainly is a literary curiosity. Here it is:—