lings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly-as it did-it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no beliefs among men but that they perished like the beasts."

In his second letter Dickens urged that the sentence of death should relegate the murderer to "the dread obscurity" of his cell; and that he should die, not upon the hustings, as it were, but behind the scenes. Years earlier, the great and wise Henry Fielding had admonished the public to the same effect. But the debauch of Hanging Monday in the Old Bailey roared on for another two decades. The last man who died

in public on this polluted spot was the Fenian, Michael Barrett, the Fawkes of the Clerkenwell explosion. The date was May 26, 1868.

This was also the adieu to the public of a noted Newgate performer, Hangman Calcraft. He was nearing seventy, and had now the habit of steadying himself with brandy before he shuffled on to the scaffold. A simple-minded old fellow, he could not have told you what victims he had turned off. Calcraft-" the short-drop man," as Marwood dubbed him-was the last executioner officially appointed by the City of London, and in 1874 he was pensioned at twenty-five shillings a week.

In a volume of reminiscences by " Thormanby " a glimpse is offered, curious in the extreme, of Calcraft in his retirement. The City's pensioner (and what with "gratilities " for the basting of garotters, and provincial hangings at £10 the job, the old man had doubtless feathered his nest) used to drop in of an evening at the "Peacock," Islington, once the great coaching-house for the mails running North. His special chair, says Thormanby," was reserved for him "in a cosy corner, and a special pair of roomy slippers, in which he used comfortably to encase his feet.' Here he sat nightly, with his long clay and tumbler of gin-and-water hot, a white-headed, venerable old gentleman, a perfect picture of spotless respectability "-and would discourse

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you of anything but hangings. Did you inadvertently address yourself to "Mr. Calcraft,' the old white brows gathered in a frown, and the sharp old eyes stared unknowing. The "Peacock's" guest acknowledged only the name of "Mr. Smithson."

THE TRAIL

I

It is (or might be) the blessed time of holidays, and some who glance at these pages will do so on a green hillside or by the sea. You have a hobby, I take it? Your hobby is perhaps so simple an affair as the study and fashioning of knots. But a knot can be intimately connected with a murder. This bundle found against a windmill is tied in a peculiar manner. Can you tell the sergeant or the magistrate whether the knot is a weaver's, a sailor's, a butcher's, or a gipsy's? Your evidence may help to hang a guilty man or save from the noose an innocent one. And by the style in which you give it you will reveal at once the degree of your intelligence!

You have been abroad with your camera and have snapshotted a motor. That motor was flying, it may be, from the scene of a murder or a burglary, and you have possibly secured an excellent likeness of the murderer or burglar.

Have you ever noticed the marks upon the King's highway? There are marks of men, of animals, and of many kinds of wheels. A fair

has been held in the neighbourhood, and the tracks in the road are numberless and of all sorts. Pick out from them the shoeprints of the horsecoper who has stolen a colt from the sale ring! The khoji of Northern India can do this. He knows the footprints of every person in his district, as we know the faces of our friends. One of these matchless trackers had hunted a criminal to the banks of a river. A rajah had just crossed the river with two hundred of his people at his important heels. Amid this jumble of feet the khoji lost the prints he had been following. Back he went for several miles to the spot at which he had first picked up the trail. Again he pursued it, and came the second time to the river's edge. He crossed the river, and there, amid the footmarks of all the rajah's retinue, the terrible khoji saw the very pair that had escaped him on the farther bank. Reading such things, we think of the magician in the Nights, who, with his ear laid to earth, distinguished among the myriad footfalls of Asia those of the youth who should lead him to the Lamp.

Let the day break cheerly to-morrow, and I shall imagine you afoot betimes. The blue smoke looks friendly, curling up from that solitary farmhouse. The house was broken into last night, but the robbery is as yet unknown. Continue your stroll, mounting the hill over