chester, by which a well-known citizen and three children were deprived of their lives, and the life of a fifth person was placed in imminent danger. The facts of this case are as follows:: At half-past 8 on the morning in question, a house-agent, named Meller, left his house at Old Trafford, and proceeded to the offices which he occupied with his son in South King Street, Manchester. He ascended the staircase, and on the second-floor landing he found a man and his wife, William Robert and Martha Anne Taylor, waiting for him. The man was armed with a large knife some ten inches long, and the woman is said to have held a six-chambered revolver for her husband's use. Mr. Meller seems to have been at once attacked by both. He was repeatedly stabbed, and fled downstairs calling for help. A porter, named Hooley, ran to his assistance, and the assassin fired the revolver at him, a ball lodging in Hooley's arm. There was then a rush of people around the man Taylor, who made no attempt to escape, and he was at once secured, but the woman, strangely enough, was allowed to walk away; she was, however, taken into custody soon afterwards. The two wounded were removed to the infirmary. On the way thither Mr. Meller was found to be quite dead; the body having received eleven incised wounds, of which several had penetrated the heart. men On being conveyed to the policeoffice, Taylor coolly gave his address, pointed to one of the keys taken from him, as belonging to a back bed-room in his dwelling, and told the officers that if they made a search there, they would find something. They did, indeed, find On the breast something, and that of a most ghastly and appalling nature. On going to Taylor's house, which was in a district called Strangeways, the police discovered in the back bed-room alluded to, the dead bodies of three children, two girls and a boy, aged respectively twelve, eight, and five years, and, strange to say, laid out in clean white nightgowns, with black ribbons round their waists. of each was pinned a paper, stating their names and ages, and on one was the following painfully suggestive scrap of incoherence :"We are six, but one at Harptry lies, Meller and Sons are our cruel murderers, but God and our loving parents will avenge us. Love rules here. We are all going to our sister to part no more." The walls and staircases of the house were found daubed with black, and what few objects the house contained-for the goods and furniture had been sold some time previously under an execution—were all smashed to pieces, as though some maniac had been exercising his unrestrained fury in the place. At the preliminary examination before the magistrates, the prisoners, on being placed at the bar, appeared of respectable exterior: the man being 37 years of age, of a dark complexion, which, added to very black hair, a moustache and beard, gave him a somewhat foreign aspect; the woman-25 years of age and fair-haired, pale and rather good-looking-was gaily dressed, and wore a fashionable straw-hat, with large feather, and a veil. From the evidence it appeared that the prisoners were tenants of a house which had been let to them by Mr. Meller, as agent of the owners; that in the previous month of January, an explosion of the kitchen boiler had taken place, by which one of their children had been killed; the male prisoner attributed the accident to the neglect of Mr. Meller, and insisted that he was entitled to compensation. He had also required the house to be repaired, which was accordingly done. Shortly after this, the prisoner, wishing to leave the house, had disagreed with Mr. Meller as to the value of the fixtures to be left; and the agents, wishing to get rid of so troublesome a tenant, who had also got into arrears for the rent, which they had offered to forego if he would give up his possession, put an execution into the house, under which nearly all the goods on the premises were sold; but the proceeds did not meet the rent and expenses of the process. A few days previous to the tragedy, the prisoners called at the offices of Mr. Meller, saying they required an account of the sale; the male prisoner remarking that the bailiff's men had pocketed some of the articles, and that the rest had been sold under their value. He did not at that interview, however, appear angry or hint any threat. But, probably, the most melancholy part of this tragical story concerned the fate of the poor children, whose lives had been taken in a manner which baffled the skill of the most famous analysts. Professor Taylor, in his evidence stated that "the result of a minute investigation was that no poison of any kind was discovered, or was present, in those portions of the viscera of either child, which had been delivered to him for examination;" in another portion of his evidence adding, that "the state of the bodies, in his opinion, was only consistent with the view that these children had died either from the effects of a poisonous vapour like that of chloroform, entering the lungs; or from suffocation or smothering, i.e. by the covering of the mouth and nostrils, SO as to prevent respiration." At the trial of the prisoners, which came on at the Summer Assizes at Liverpool, before Mr. Baron Wilde, the male prisoner pleaded "Not a shadow of guilty;" the female prisoner, "Not guilty.' For the defence, Mr. Pope, who appeared for the man Taylor, relied upon the nature and the quality of the acts committed by him, as indicating that, at the time, the prisoner was labouring under such a defect of reason as not to be aware that he was doing wrong-that he was possessed of one absorbing idea, leading him to believe that the murdered man was responsible for the death of his child by a boiler explosion. That with respect to the other children their sacrifice was marked with the deepest pathos in one part of the case, indifference in another; but with respect to which the prisoner had attempted no concealment and from which there was no attempt to escape, and no consideration for the consequences of his act. For the female prisoner, who was defended by Mr. Overend, it was contended that she had taken no part in the murder, and denied that she had gone to the office of the deceased with any other object than that of complaining of the distraining against their property; that there was no evidence that she knew of the fate of the children or in disproof of the probability that she might have been deceived by her husband with respect to them. The learned Judge having summed up the evidence in a very impressive manner, the jury returned a verdict of Guilty against the male prisoner, and of Not Guilty as against the woman. Taylor was executed according to his sentence. To the last he was inconvincible that he had committed any crime in murdering his victim; and he left a letter indicating in a remarkable manner the excitement of his mind. 21. FATAL FIRE IN CRIPPLEGATE-FOUR LIVES LOST.-About 2 o'clock in the morning a disastrous fire broke out in the premises of Mr. J. A. Joel, stationer, 42, Fore Street, Cripplegate. There were in the house at that time Mrs. Joel, the wife of the proprietor, Henry Samuel, and Annetta Joel, full-grown persons, and a servant named Hannah Johnson. The eldest son Henry was the first to be aroused by the alarm. He hastily put on his clothes and went into his mother's room, and, as he supposed, awoke her, and then rushed downstairs, opened the street-door, and made his escape unhurt. His precipitancy completed the catastrophe, for he left the street-door open, and the draught of air thus occasioned speedily fanned the fire into a fierce conflagration. The unhappy inmates were cut off from flight, and could be heard screaming from the upper floors. The engines and the fire-escape were speedily at hand; the latter was placed against the front of the house, and the conductor, Briggs, who seems to have behaved with exemplary courage, ascended to the second floor. Here he heard faint cries of "Help!" proceeding from the third floor, and threw up his "fly-ladder;" he had succeeded in getting hold of the young woman Annette and was dragging her out of the window, when the poor girl, in her terror, made such struggles, that she overpowered the conductor, and fell from his arms on to the stone-flags below. She was greatly injured by the fall, and was much burned by the fire, so that she died shortly after her admission into the hospital. The conductor also narrowly escaped; in falling he managed to seize a round of the ladder, and hung for some time with his head downwards. In the meanwhile, the other unfortunates were perishing by the most horrible of deaths. When the fire had been extinguished and the firemen were able to search the premises, the remains of Mrs. Joel and the servant were found on the third floor, terribly burnt; and the body of Samuel Joel at the bottom of the stairs, also burnt. 22. THE LUDGATE HILL TRAGEDY.-Scarcely had the public mind recovered from the excitement produced by the intelligence of the Manchester tragedy, before the feeling was doomed to be intensified by the report of a similar horror perpetrated on Ludgatehill, in the establishment of Mr. Vyse, for many years the proprietor of an extensive straw hat and milinery business conducted by his wife, by whose insane act her two children met their deaths from poison administered to them; after effecting which the unhappy mother made an attempt upon her own life with a razor, and with such a determined purpose, that for many days no expectations were entertained that that attempt had failed of success. The particulars of this shocking case were as follows:-In the afternoon of the day in question, Mrs. Vyse, having previously made personal application at a neighbouring chemist's for some powders, which she alleged she required for the destruction of mice on her premises, sent her servant-maid for a further supply. On her return with the powders, the girl went upstairs to her mistress's room, which was upon the first floor; but on knocking at the door was answered that she could not come in. Apprehending that something was wrong, she became excited, and without attempting to enter the room, hurried downstairs, and intimated to Mrs. Vyse's sister the nature of her suspicions. When the room door, which although shut, did not prove to be barred or fastened, was opened, a frightful sight met their view. There sat Mrs. Vyse in a chair, an open and blood-stained razor in her right hand, her head bent forward, and a torrent of blood gushing from a broad cut in her throat into a basin placed beneath it. The two women, with rare presence of mind, at once stopped the hæmorrhage; when the unfortunate victim of her own morbidity, finding herself interrupted in the consummation of self-murder, and pointing to another room, feebly uttered the words, "Go there-go there; there are my children." Shocked by the weight which these broken but suggestive phrases added to the misery of the scene, one of the women hastened to the place indicated, and there found the dead bodies of two of Mrs. Vyse's children-little girls, one six and the other seven years of Upon their persons there was no mark of violence, and as they had but half-an-hour before VOL. CIV. been seen full of life and animation, there could be no other opinion with respect to their sudden dissolution than that it had been occasioned by poison. The women at once alarmed the rest of the establishment, when further efforts were made to secure the wound in Mrs. Vyse's throat until the arrival of some surgeon, in search of whom a messenger was at once despatched; at the same time that an intimation of the horrible scene which had just taken place was forwarded to the Inspector of the City Police, at Fleetstreet station, and to the summoning officer for the ward of Farringdon Within. A surgeon was soon found, but his services were, as regards the children, of no avail, as they had been some time dead; in the case of their unhappy mother, however, his professional skill was of the greatest advantage, as he bound up her wound and effectually stayed the hemorrhage. On the trial, which took place at the Central Criminal Court, evidence was given that the powders administered to the children were known as "Battle's Vermin Powders," containing a large portion of strychnia, one quarter of a grain of which would have been sufficient to destroy the life of children of such tender years, the elder child being only seven and the younger six years of age. It was proved that the mother, who was 33 years of age, was of an extremely affectionate disposition to all her children, accustomed to dress and undress them night and morning, and that the children were much attached to her. Much stress was laid upon the fact of a letter being delivered by the prisoner to her sister, which was not forthcoming at the trial, and therefore H animadverted upon by the prosecuting counsel as containing evidence likely to elucidate the case for the Crown; but the sister of the unhappy lady declared she had destroyed it, without reading it, and was therefore quite unable to testify to the contents. Evidence was then offered on behalf of the prisoner, who was defended by Mr. Serjeant Ballantine, to show that the relations of Mrs. Vyse in several instances had been confined for insanity-one of them having committed suicide. Mr. Justice Wightman, who presided at the trial, having summed up the case, the jury, after deliberating a short time, returned their verdict of Not Guilty, on the ground of insanity whereupon the prisoner was ordered to be detained in safe custody during Her Majesty's plea sure. 24. OPENING OF THE NEW WESTMINSTER BRIDGE. After many disappointments and great delays, the new bridge, the handsome and convenient substitute for the ugly and dangerous old structure at Westminster, erected in 1739-51 by Labelye, a Swiss engineer, was thrown open to the public. Under any circumstances the erection of the new bridge across the Thames would have been a work of time, for it was an essential part of the design that the traffic between Westminster and Lambeth should not be interrupted even for a day. For this purpose the passage was continued in its usual course, while the southern half of the new bridge was built; the traffic from the centre was then diverted into the new roadway, and the old arches removed; then the northern half was erected, and when it had been joined on to the southern portion, No the whole roadway was thrown open in a straight line, and the remainder of the old bridge was removed. The designs of Mr. Page for the new structure having been accepted, the works were commenced in May, 1854 ; but the contractors failed soon after, and it was not until 1859 that the operations were pushed on with vigour. As the works by which the piers of the old bridge of Labelye were fixed in the bed of the river were thought a miracle of engineering invention, so these of Mr. Page were novel and ingenious. coffer-dams or caissons were used. Elm piles were driven far below the river bed into the London clay. Round these were forced in massive iron circular piles, grooved at the edges, so as to admit of great sheets of cast-iron being slid down like shutters between them The gravel, mud, and stones within the spaces thus enclosed were dredged out, and the void filled up with concrete to low-water mark. Upon this concrete the masonryenormous slabs of granite, weighing from 8 to 12 tons-was fixed for the piers, and on these were raised the massive stone piers themselves. The arches of the bridge are seven in number, each formed of seven ribs, which are of cast-iron nearly up to the crown, where, to avoid danger from the concussion of heavy loads, they are of wrought metal. The arches vary in span from the smallest, of 96ft., to the largest in the centre, of 120ft., and from a height above high water level of from 16ft., to 20ft. The materials used in the construction of the whole bridge have been 4200 tons of cast and 1400 tons of wrought iron, 30,000 cubic yards of concrete, 21,000 cubic yards of brickwork set in |