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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:—

George Cass saith,—“How it was done you know. She made me mad, you know; and I was coming from righting a ewe. She was in the passage or lobby, as some folk call it, coming out of the front door, leading into the yard opposite to the stable. I had been in the orchard righting the ewe. She wanted me to do something with her caulkers; and then, you know, as I would not bother with her caulkers, and then she began to bother and call me. She had a knife in her hand, and I was standing between the stable-door and the house-door, and then she threw the knife at me, and the haft just catched me on the left cheek, just below the cheek-bone. Well, then, I clicked it up in my madness, and I just took it up and threw it at the deceased Ann Sewell. She was then standing just within a yard from the door in the passage, and it struck just about there (prisoner pointing to the apple of his throat); somewhere about the part of the throat which projects out. Well, then, you know, she ran from there down to the bottom of the passage. She did not scream out ‘Oh, dear.’ She says, ‘Come here and put me away altogether.’ She said she could not find it of her heart to go out again. Well, then, I said, I did not like. She begged and prayed of me either twice or three times to do it, and then I just took up t’knife, which I had in my hand, and just came a stroke across the left side of her neck. When I was coming a second time she put her hand up to the left side of her face, and she said it did not seem to go far enough in. ‘Give us another.’ I gave like a second one, when she asked me: and then she stood a little bit, and then she dropped. She never said nout (nothing) more after she dropped, and she laid there. Then I came up into the kitchen, and I took the knife up with me and thought I would wash it, and then I rued—I would not; and I just went and put it into her hand, and there was just a drop of blood about the size of a half-penny on here (pointing to his waistcoat), and then just with that John Robinson came up to the door. I was in the back-kitchen at the time washing my waistcoat-breast with my hand. I just stepped aside till he went away, and he went into the stable, and then he came out again and went away home. When I saw him off I washed my hands and waistcoat out, and then I went like down into the kitchen and went out of the front window into the orchard, and then I got my mare out of the stable, and then when I got her into the field she would not stand until I got the gear on. She went galloping back into the fold. Then I went and brought her back and yoked her. About a quarter of an hour after that, I saw Mr. Boys going down. A little bit after that there was a young lad went down on a cuddy donkey, and then I saw nothing more till Mr. Boys’ girl came to take me home that night. Then, when I got home, Mrs. Fearon told me to go in at the front window, and I said, ‘No, I could get in at the back door.’ I had got in many a time at it, and then I opened the door for the mistress. I opened the door with that piece of iron that Mr. Brown had there. [Cass was here cautioned a second time, but said he only wanted to tell the truth.] Then at night, after we had all gone to bed, I went up-stairs into Ann Sewell’s room. Her and me was down at Cockermouth one night before that a bit, and she wanted to get some things, and she had forgotten her purse, and she asked me if I had any money in my pocket, and I said I had a half-crown if that would do aught for her, and so I lent her it. So, as I thought I had lent her the half-crown, I thought I would have it back again. Then I just looked into her box, and there was a little bag, you know, that they hang over their arms, and I opened this and I found a purse in it, and I just opened it, and there was just eighteen-pence in it, and then I just put the eighteen-pence in the purse in my pocket, and then I groped her frock-pocket, as I thought there might be something more in it, and there was a half-crown in it. I put that in my pocket In the morning I was putting the half-crown into the purse with the eighteen-pence, and at one side of the purse there was a little hole in it, and a sovereign in it. I did not know what to make of the sovereign, and I owed our folk a sovereign, and so I was over home on Wednesday night after I got the sovereign, and I just left the purse and sovereign with my mother. Then I spent the half-crown, and got some drink on the road. And then I had eighteen-pence left; and then I ran out of ’bacco, and sent for another ounce. Then I had like fifteen-pence left. But Sarah Dixon,