To be a boy again.
N.
Old Age.—Remember, old man, that you are now in the waning, and the date of your pilgrimage well nigh expired; and now that it behoveth you to look towards your final accounting, your force languisheth, your senses impair, your body droops, and on every side the ruinous cottage of your faint and feeble flesh threateneth the fall; and having so many harbingers of death to premonish you of your end, how can you but prepare for so dreadful a stranger? The young man may die quickly, but the old man cannot live long; the young man’s life by casualty may be abridged, but the old man’s term by no physic can be long adjourned; and therefore, if green years should sometimes think of the grave and the judgment, the thoughts of old age should continually dwell on the same.—Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh.
EXTRAORDINARY DETECTION OF MURDER.
It is a speculation perhaps equally interesting to the philosophic as to the untutored mind, and dwelt on with as much placidity by the one as by the other, to reflect on the various and extraordinary modes by which the hand of Providence has through all ages withdrawn the dark mantle of concealment from the murderer’s form, and stamped condemnation on his brow—sometimes before the marks of the bloody deed were yet dried, and sometimes after long years of security had seemed to insure final escape, whether the detection arose from some peculiar circumstance awaking remorse so powerfully as to compel the murderer to self-accusation through an ungovernable impulse; from the hauntings of guilty terror; from over-anxiety to avoid suspicion; or from some utterly slight and unforeseen casualty.
The popular belief has always been, that of all criminals the shedder of blood never escapes detection and punishment even in this life; and though a very limited experience may show the fallacy of such belief as regards the vengeance man can inflict, who may conceive that inflicted by the tortured conscience?—that hell which even the unbeliever does not mock, which permits neither hope nor rest, invests the summer sunshine with a deeper blackness than that of midnight, peoples the air with moving and threatening spectres, embodies the darkness into terrible shapes, and haunts even slumber with visionary terrors more hideous than the worst realities.
The records of crime in our own and other countries contain numerous striking examples of the detection of murder by singular and sometimes apparently trivial means. These have appeared in a variety of published forms, and are of course generally known; but we shall select a few unpublished instances which have come within our own cognizance, and seem to us to possess peculiar and striking features of their own, in the hope that they may be found to possess some interest for the readers of the Irish Penny Journal.
The case we shall first select, not so much for the manner of the murderer’s detection as for the singular plan he struck out to escape suspicion, and the strange circumstances connected with the crime and its punishment altogether, is that of a man named M’Gennis, for the murder of his wife.
M’Gennis, when we saw him on his trial, was a peculiarly powerful-looking man, standing upwards of six feet, strongly proportioned, and evidently of great muscular strength. His countenance, however, was by no means good, his face being colourless, his brow heavy, and the whole cast of his features stern and forbidding. From his appearance altogether he struck us at once as one eminently fitted and likely to have played a conspicuous part in the faction fights so common during his youth at our fairs and markets. But though we made several inquiries both then and since, we could not learn that he had ever been prominent in such scenes, or remarkable for a quarrelsome disposition. He was a small farmer, residing at a village nearly in a line between the little town of Claremorris, and the still smaller but more ancient one of Ballyhaunis, near the borders of Mayo. With him lived his mother and wife, a very comely young woman, it is said, to whom he had not been long married at the time of the perpetration of the murder, and with whom he had never had any previous altercation such as to attract the observation or interference of the neighbours.