Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/171

Rh that were affixed on the walls with a view to discover the thieves! Indeed, it must have been the feeling, that the watchmen were near, which lulled the suspicions of those inhabitants into an imaginary security.

Although it does not come within our province to notice murders that are committed from sudden gusts of passion, or the dark malignity of oifended pride, yet such as accompany robbery are more certainly within our view. As such we must notice a wide-spreading calamity, in the perpetration of murder by wholesale as the first step to burglary. Ever since the murder of the family of Marr, in Ratcliffe Highway, and that immediately following, of the Williamsons, in Gravel Lane, we have heard of those compound atrocities more frequently than of any other species of coal-black offence. The first mentioned was committed on the master, mistress, and children of a haberdasher, who keeping his shop open until twelve o'clock of a Saturday night, thereby allured the murderer to take their lives, the easier to come at the money, the receiving of which could not fail to be seen from the street through the window. A tolerably good lesson this for people who cautiously make a display of their property.