was impossible; after repeated trials and failures, he tried to carry it off; but this also he found impossible without assistance. The perspiration poured down his face. He had come so far, been hitherto so successful, and now all seemed hopeless! He had incurred the risk, and not gained his object.

Suddenly the thought of his man Blösel occurred to him. He could be induced to assist. In another minute he had crept from the counting-house, and through the street door, which he closed carefully, and hurried to the bedside of his sleeping apprentice. Blösel, half stupified with sleep, heard him describe in glowing colours the wealth and enjoyment which awaited him if he had the courage to make one bold and easy stroke. It did not seem to require much eloquence to overcome the scruples of the apprentice, if indeed he felt any; for, rubbing his eyes to assure himself that he was awake, he jumped out of bed, dressed rapidly, and followed his master down stairs.

In the silent sleeping streets they only met one living soul, and concluded it was a watchman-it was probably the very shopkeeper who deposed to having seen two suspiciouslooking men crossing the Horse-market about that hour. They found the street door slightly ajar. They entered, carried off the cash-box without disturbance, and transported it home. They opened it, and divided the spoil, during the absence of Gösser's wife. They hid the box in a hole under the workshop, and there it had remained until three weeks ago, when it was removed, broken to pieces, and thrown into the Pegnitz, -the muddy stream which flows through Nürnberg.

Four days after the robbery, Gösser confessed it to his wife, who swooned away, and on recovering herself implored him to restore the money, as indeed she had continued daily to implore him, ever since. But he paid some pressing debts, bought what was needed for his business, as well as clothes for himself and family; and would not hear of restoring the

no one had even hinted at it. The idea occurred to him; he had no accomplice but Blösel; had never spoken to any one on the subject except Blösel and his wife, neither before nor since, least of all to the Maunerts, Schönleben, or Beutner. These were entirely innocent. and Blösel alone were guilty.

He

Before his arrest and imprisonment Gösser had attempted suicide, by cutting his throat with a razor; and in prison he tried to open a vein; but both attempts had been frustrated. He confessed having made these attempts "from despair." Beyond this single crime he had nothing of which to accuse himself. His life had been honest until that fatal 29th June. He could give no reason for that deed, except the pressing poverty which weighed him down.

This confession was made so simply, so explicitly, and was corroborated in so many details, that no doubt could arise as to its perfect truth; and one would have thought that the previously accused prisoners would now be set at liberty, and their entire innocence proclaimed. Not so, however. Nürnberg justice, rash enough in suspicion of crime, was tardy in recognition of innocence. It dreaded the idea of having been so deplorably misled.

Gösser's wife was next examined. She corroborated in all essential points the statement of her husband. On the night in question she slept away from her husband on account of the sickness of her baby, then at the breast; so that she knew nothing of his getting up and quitting the house. Only in respect of the day on which he confessed the crime to her did she differ from his statement. It was on the second, not on the fourth day after the deed. She had just returned from being" churched" at St Laurenz; and saw her husband pay a dollar for some nails he had bought; on her asking him, when alone, where that money came from, he replied that Herr von Scheidlin had paid him some money in advance for work ordered. She reproached him for acting without her advice and knowledge, keeping her in ignorance of his affairs; whereupon he replied that if she would only be a

decent woman and leave off reproaching him, he would willingly tell her everything. He constantly went out into the shop, and after whispering with the apprentice Blösel, returned again; and as she, with some impatience, demanded what this all meant, he seized her by the arm, led her into the bedroom, and having first asked her if she would forgive him, and not be startled at what he told her, he confessed all. She thought the earth would swallow her. She implored him not to ruin her and the children; but he pacified her, and assured her that no one would ever know anything about it. She gave an accurate account of how the money had been spent: an account which proved them to have been in the utmost need; and she described the various places where the rest of the money was hidden, naming which sums belonged to the apprentice, and which to her husband. She declared that repeatedly she had urged the restoration of at least a part of the money, and intreated him to make his peace with God and man by a confession; but he was immovable. When she painted to him the sufferings which the innocent were undergoing for his crime, he tried to reassure her, declaring that their innocence must soon be proved, and then they would be set free.

Magnus Melchior Blösel, the apprentice, aged twenty-five, son of a working carpenter, still living in Nürnberg, confessed to all that Gösser had said. He only urged, as a defence, that he had struggled against temptation. When Gösser on the night of the 29th June shook him in his bed and awoke him by the assurance that both of them should be made happy, he asked, how? and where? No sooner had these questions been answered than he exclaimed, "For God's sake, master! what will come of it? We should both come to grief!"-hoping by this to dissuade the master. Blösel, in subsequent investigations, did not persist in even this modest scruple; and admitted that the master's reply, "Pho! nothing will come of it," quite silenced him. He corroborated all the other details, and declared that it was on his repeated remonstrances

that Gösser at length made a clean breast of it to his wife. He had also often spoken with Gösser about the unhappy accused suffering for them, but only got for answer, that "these must be set free at last, and thus we are safe."

After a second search in Gösser's dwelling, which completely confirmed all that had been said, and which yielded upwards of 200 gulden, from various hiding-places; and after pieces of the iron-box had been fished up from the Pegnitz, and recognised-in fact, after no shadow of doubt could exist as to the truth of Gösser's story, the unfortunate Maunert, Schönleben, and Beutner, were lightened of their irons, and their imprisonment in many respects mitigated; but it still continued; and it was only by degrees that they were informed of the new turn the affair had taken.

And now imagine the torrent of public wrath against the barber Kirchmeier, whom every one accused of being the sole cause of all the cruel injustice perpetrated on the Maunerts, no one, of course, accusing himself of having, by credulity and facile hypothesis of guilt, aided and abetted. Kirchmeier was held responsible for all. It was not enough that he had perjured himself; he had misled justice, had caused the death of one poor woman, and the sufferings of a whole family. He was arrested on the 4th November; and after the three confessions had been read aloud to him, was asked if he still ventured to affirm what he had sworn?

With firm voice Kirchmeier declared, "That he could still in clear conscience affirm that, on the morning in question, in the presence of Frau Maunert and her youngest son, while shaving Maunert, he had seen a dark green-striped cash-box, painted with flowers on the cover, and the lock ornamented with four leaves, such as he had previously described, standing by the oven behind the door. It was to him inexplicable and inconceivable that God should so have suffered him to be deceived, inasmuch as he had never traced the slightest tendency to illusion, or defect of understanding, all his life.

He could not believe in such a deception of his senses."

In vain were the confessions read to him; in vain was all the corroborative evidence adduced; in vain were the fragments fished up from the river laid before him; he steadfastly held to his original position, that he had seen such a box in the place stated, and on the day stated. No one knew-no one ever knew whether this was a real conviction, or a simulated confidence, adopted out of self-defence.

ceases.

And here the psychological interest of this case rises to its height, precisely where the criminal interest What mystery lies at the bottom of Kirchmeier's accusation? He was not himself in any way implicated in the robbery, so that his motive could not have been to divert suspicion. He was not known to be in any degree unfriendly with the Maunerts, and the absurd idea of his having accused them, because irritated at receiving no new-year's gift, by its very absurdity shows that no intelligible motive for hatred existed. If therefore the motive was neither one of self-defence nor of diabolical malice, what was it? To this day the problem of that conduct remains unsolved; and the psychologist may fairly ask, Was it not wholly an hallucination on the barber's part? Was not this pretended cash-box, seen at Maunert's, the product of a too vivid imagination giving reality to its conceptions, as Macbeth's heatoppressed brain saw the actual dagger marshalling him the way which he was going, and on its blade and dudgeon gouts of blood?" There are sufficient examples of hallucination, even in persons not suspected of any mental disturbance, to render such an idea very probable.

Kirchmeier declared that he had never known himself liable to any illusions of the senses. And this may have been the case. But he was of a bilious, excitable temperament; and had only quite recently recovered from a severe attack of bilious fever. If now we imagine such a man greatly excited by the news of the robbery, and hearing on all hands descriptions of the cash-box, it is very conceivable that the image of this

cash-box would soon become so vivid to his mind, that to believe he had seen it somewhere would be an easy, almost irresistible step. But where? That he had noticed it at Maunert's might have occurred to him, either from a dim recollection of the medallion box, or perhaps from a supposed suspiciousness in the behaviour of the Maunerts. At any rate, it seems quite clear to us that this idea of Maunert's room being the locality must have been an after-thought, since on his mentioning to Hölzel that he had seen such a cash-box somewhere, he did not, on being asked where give any direct answer. Now it is in the highest degree improbable that he should have concealed such a fact-having no motive for concealment-as that he had seen the box on the very morning of that day, in Maunert's room. Not until ten days afterwards did Kirchmeier tell Hölzel where he had seen it. Having once conceived the idea that he had seen the cash-box at Maunert's, the belief could only strengthen in his mind. Indeed, this is the very nature of an hallucination; and perhaps the reader may be interested if we digress a little here to narrate an authentic case, which will render Kirchmeier's hallucination intelligible, We take it from Professor Draper's Human Physiology, where it is narrated by the physician to whom it occurred.

When he was five or six years old, he dreamed that he was passing by a large pond of water in a very solitary place. On the opposite side of it there stood a great tree, that looked as if it had been struck by lightning; and in the pond, at another part, an old fallen trunk, on one of the prone limbs of which there was a turtle sunning himself. "On a sudden," he says, " a wind arose, which forced me into the pond, and in my dying struggles to extricate myself from its green and slimy waters, I awoke, trembling with terror. About eight years after, while recovering from an attack of scarlet fever, this dream presented itself to me again, identical in all respects. Even up to this time I do not think I had even seen a living tortoise or turtle; but I indistinctly remembered there was

from starvation, he had to quit Nürnberg, where he had so long been known and respected, as a religious, honourable, punctual citizen. With what thoughts he must have endured this punishment, if he felt himself innocent! What he really felt was never known to others than his family; nor was there ever any clue as to whether he really continued to believe what he had so steadfastly asserted.

After such a case, the value of a single witness, however explicit his statement, and however honourable his character, necessarily became comparatively slight. No two persons would be likely to have had precisely the same illusion; and unless two persons swear to a fact, jurisprudence very properly sees a possibility of the witness being in error.

And the unhappy accused? Public opinion of course turned completely round, and every one was anxious to help by sympathy, or friendly offices, those whom it had so unjustly condemned. It is not recorded how many gossips on door-steps and in beer-houses asserted that they had always thought the accused were innocent; but we may be sure that this ex-post-facto clearsightedness was abundantly proclaimed. nert, indeed, had lost his wife, and his children were motherless; Schönleben's youngest child had also been murdered. These graves could not be reopened; but these sorrows might to some extent be lightened, and the simple good-natured Nürnbergers did their best to make the sufferers forget what was in truth unforgetable.

Mau

AFTER a day spent by woods and waters, on the heather or the green turf, there is a faint sensation of the odious in re-entering a town--even in treading a turnpike road. The sunny days of an autumn recess only deepen the contrast between the healthy freshness of nature and the insalubrity that mankind bring about them wherever they are densely congregatednot merely in the unpaved lane or narrow court where poor people live all the year round, but also in the squares and crescents where all is done that the habits and the sanitary science of the day suggest to mitigate the offence. The recollection of the fetid dust on the hot stones which drove us away in August, revives when we return in November, and adds to whatever reality there may be in the comparative impurity of town air. But of all the reminiscences of this kind, what can ever have been so potent, "infandum revocare dolorem," as the return of the British Legislature to the banks of the Thames must be? Whether oblivious or not to the cry of other sufferers wailing for sanitary reform and the removal of noxious nuisances, they did at last

fairly catch it themselves, and an exulting public said, Take that, and remember. No doubt they will remember. The duty of the Legislator was never so brought home to him before. He had just built for himself his "lordly pleasure-house, " and in the towers he placed great bells that swung," and might have asked, like the Queen of the palace of art, "Who shall gaze upon my palace with unblinded eyes," when behold a curse more dire than hers, even when "On corpses three months old at noon she

came,

That stood against the wall". comes down upon his grandeur, and envelopes it in filth and stench. So terrible a combination of pestiferous gases had the machinations of the sanitarians rolled down upon the Houses of Parliament, that Cockneydom might have fairly expected some unconscious person to accomplish at last their proverbial impossibility of setting the Thames on fire, and to behold their favourite river glittering like a petroleum lake with little lambent flames catching its escaping gases. Indeed, among the multitudinous projects for disposing usefully, properly, ornamentally, and