Along the wall, on the right side of the room, is ranged a choice collection of guns, crowbars, and “jemmies,” the latter implements of the housebreaking industry, which admit of great variety, and are susceptible of highly artistic handling; and among them is a pair of tongs unevenly rusted, and with a dirty paper book written all over with incoherent sentences attached to it.
The tongs are those with which a man named Macdonald killed his wife some four or five years ago. He was hanged, as also were many of the proprietors of the horrid labelled assortment of hammers, knives, including the bread-carving and pocket varieties, razors and pistols which suggest a booth in a fair.
There is dried blood on all the knives and razors, and some of the hammers also, and every one of them stands for a murder or suicide.
In a terrible number of cases they record the murder of a wife by her husband.
Several of the pistols, mostly beautiful weapons, are the instruments of suicide, and each is labelled with the name, date, and place.
The simple suicides are almost all among the higher class of society; and when the visitor asks how the pistol, with which a gentleman of wealth and station shot himself, came into the keeping of the museum, he is told—
“The family mostly do not like to have it, and so they ask the police to take it away.”
In a corner hang the clothes of the Rev. J. Watson, who murdered his wife at Stockwell, the horse-pistol with which he shot her, and the heavy hammer with which he knocked the nails into the chest, in which he proposed to hide her body.
So carefully had the murderer washed his trousers and his coat-sleeves, that the blood stains could only be observed with difficulty at the time of the investigation.
But since the coat and trousers have been hanging on the Black Museum’s walls, the stains have come out close and thick.