kerchief on a table, pressed his face down upon it, and then, with his arms folded round his head, remained in a state of syncope. A more miserable picture of guilt and despair, without any real penitence for the crime, poor humanity had never surely presented.

In prison Corder slept soundly. In the jail chapel, when he first entered the condemned pew, he wept convulsively for the first time. He still refused to make a full confession.

"The sermons," said he, "which have been put into my hands since I came into this place have convinced me that all confession which it is necessary for me to make is a confession to my God of the transgressions of my life. Confession to man can be of no good to my soul; I do not like it, and I will not make it, as it savours strongly of popedom." To another person he said, "Why should I disgrace my family by confessing all the follies and transgressions of my youth? They are indeed manifold; the confession would hurt their feelings, and would do me no good."

He refused to see any Methodist preacher. It was only after great difficulty that Mr. Orridge, the governor of the jail, persuaded Corder to make a confession, and not let Maria Marten's memory be stained by the accusation of her having committed suicide. A little before midnight he suddenly said to the governor, "I am a guilty man!" but he would not enter into any full detail. The following was the confession

"Bury Jail, Aug. 10, 1828. Condemned Cell, "Sunday Evening, half-past eleven. "I acknowledge being guilty of the death of poor Maria Marten, by shooting her with a pistol. The particulars are as follows: When we left her father's house we began quarrelling about the burial of the child, she apprehending that the place wherein it was deposited would be found out. The quarrel continued for about three-quarters of an hour upon this and about other subjects. A scuffle ensued, and during the scuffle, and at the time I think that she had hold of me, I took the pistol from the side-pocket of my velveteen jacket and fired. She fell, and died in an instant. I never saw even a struggle. I was overwhelmed with agitation and dismay. The body fell near the front doors on the floor of the barn. A vast quantity of blood issued from the wound, and ran on to the floor and through the crevices. Having determined to bury the body in the barn (about two hours after she was dead), I went and borrowed the spade of Mrs. Stow;

but before I went there I dragged the body from the barn into the chaff-house, and locked up the barn. I returned again into the barn and began to dig the hole; but the spade being a bad one, and the earth firm and hard, I was obliged to go home for a pickaxe and a better spade, with which I dug the hole and then buried the body. I think I dragged the body by the handkerchief that was tied round her neck. It was dark when I finished covering up the body. I went the next day, and washed the blood from off the barn-floor. I declare to Almighty God I had no sharp instrument about me, and that no other wound but the one made by the pistol was inflicted by me. I have been guilty of great idleness, and at times led a dissolute life, but I hope through the mercy of God to be forgiven.

Corder that night again slept soundly.

W. CORDER."

This murder had excited great and marked interest in Suffolk. The streets had been full of puppet-shows representing the scene of the crime. A Methodist preacher had held forth to five thousand persons in the neighbourhood of the barn. On the Monday of the execution all the workmen in Bury struck work in order to see the hanging. As early as nine o'clock upwards of a thousand persons assembled; before twelve, seven thousand had collected. When Corder stood on the scaffold, Mr. Orridge approached the wretch and spoke to him. He (the governor) then advanced to the front of the scaffold, and cried to the people

"He acknowledges the justice of his sentence, and dies at peace with all mankind."

A magisterial order caused Corder's skeleton to be preserved in the museum of the county hospital. Shortly before his execution, Corder wrote the following letter to his wife:

"My life's loved Companion. I am now a-going to the fatal scaffold, and I have a lively hope of obtaining mercy and pardon for my numerous offences. May Heaven bless and protect you through this transitory vale of misery, and which, when we meet again, may it be in the regions of everlasting bliss. Adieu, my love, for ever adieu; in less than two hours I hope to be in heaven. My last prayer is, that God will indue you with patience, fortitude, and resignation to His will. Rest assured His wise Providence works all things together for good. The awful sentence which has been passed upon me, and which I am now summoned to answer, I confess is very just, and I die in peace with all mankind, truly

grateful for the kindnesses I have received from Mr. Orridge, and the religious instruction and consolation from the Rev. Mr. Stocking, who has promised to take my last words to you."

Subsequent disclosures prove this man to have been a scoundrel, blood and bone, and his victim's character not much better. Even at school he had been notorious for stealing, and had bought false keys, with which he could open any boy's trunk he wished to ransack. He confessed to a forgery on a bank; and it was generally supposed he had murdered a child that he, Maria, and the stepmother secretly buried. Whether the deaths of his father and brother were to be attributed in any way to his cruel agency, was never investigated. There can be no doubt he died a liar, for he obstinately persisted he had never used a sword. This was, no doubt, in order to try and prove that the murder was not premeditated, and only the result of a sudden quarrel. The fool forgot that he had been seen snapping his pistol in Marten's cottage the morning of the murder.

The excitement of the crime did not cease with the execution. Melodramas were written upon it; and the Red Barn itself was all but pulled to pieces by curiosity-mongers from London. Phrenologists, rejoicing in a triumph of their young science, announced pompously to the scientific world that in Corder's skull "secretiveness, destructiveness, and philoprogenitiveness were inordinately developed."

RESURRECTION MEN. BURKE AND HARE.

FOR several days in the summer of 1829, a certain committecroom of the House of Commons, as well as all the passages leading to it, were thronged by some of the strangest and vilest beings that have perhaps ever visited such respectable places. Sallow, cadaverous, gaunt men, dressed in greasy moleskin or rusty black, and wearing wisps of dirty white handkerchiefs round their wizen necks. They had the air of wicked sextons, or thievish grave-diggers; there was a suspicion of degraded clergymen about them, mingled with a dash of Whitechapel costermonger. Their ghoulish faces were rendered horrible by smirks of self-satisfied cunning, and their eyes squinted with sidelong suspicion, fear, and distrust.

These were resurrection-men, vampires who earned their bread in a horrible way by digging up newly-interred bodies in the churchyards of London and its surburbs, and selling them for dissection. They had been raked together from their favourite house of call, The Fortune of War, in Smithfield. There were terrible rumours that when "subjects" ran short, they had a way of making dead bodies. The most eminent of them was Izzy, a Jew, who bought bodies of sextons, and sold dead people's teeth to dentists. He was at last transported for a highway robbery. The evidence of these ghouls will best explain their habits. One of them deposed that, in one year alone, he had sold one hundred bodies. The most he had ever obtained had been twenty-three in four nights. There were, he said, about fifty resurrection-men in London; but they were for the most part petty thieves, who only called themselves resurrection-men in order to account to the police for being about at suspicious hours. "Lifters" usually went about in light carts, and the difficulty was to baffle the armed watchmen placed in every London burial-ground, and who

fired on persons discovered searching for bodies. They were frequently shot at, and the trade became dangerous. The rich were buried too deep; their favourite game was workhouse subjects, who were sometimes laid three or four together. It was a good living if a man "kept sober and acted with judgment." It was sometimes their "dodge" to pass off as relatives of the dead and to claim workhouse bodies.

At this same time, Edinburgh, too, had its resurrection-men -wretches perfectly well known to the police and their neighbours as engaged in the dreadful traffic, but by no means shunned by the refuse of the Old Town if they were sociable, and reasonably liberal with whisky. On Friday, the 31st of October, 1828, two of these men were to be seen lounging about the West Port, especially round the snuff, whisky, and chandlers' shops of that miserable neighbourhood. One was William Burke, a short, thickset Irish cobbler, with a round smirking face, high check-bones, and small, pert, hard features. His deep-set grey eyes had not a savage expression, but there was a specious cunning cruelty about them. His hair and small whiskers were sandy, his complexion sanguineous. The detestable fawning-looking fellow was buttoned up in a shabby blue frock-coat, which almost hid a dirty striped cotton waistcoat. A black tangled neckcloth graced his grimy limp collar and bull neck.

This ruffian's companion was William Hare, a fish-hawker, and, like Burke, an Irishman; a squalid skeleton of a man, with leering watery almost idiotic eyes, a thin aquiline nose, the forehead of an ape, but the bony resolute chin of a man who would commit a murder for half a mutchkin of whisky.

Burke's house was one of those towering dens that the scanty space within ramparts in old times led men to build; vast burrows for thieves, ruffians, and beggars, such as many of those with which the Old Town still swarms. It had five stories-five layers of vice, sin, and wretchedness; a few Sovereigns would have bought the furniture of the whole five families. This nest of misery looked out on a piece of waste ground, to which a door on Burke's stair led.

Hare's house was of another order of wretchedness in Tanner's Close, opening off the West Port, a little beyond Burke's. It was a one-storied house, with three rooms, and well known as a beggars' sleeping-place. Its dreary back windows looked out on the same waste ground as Burke's. About six o'clock on the 31st of October, the day on which these two rascals are seen together, Burke was taking a dram (no unfrequent habit of his) at the shop of a Mr. Rymer, close by his house. A little old Irish beggar-woman from Glasgow