live, is pretty and fresh Miss Julia Smith with
a branch ot' "property coral" in her hand, singing

"Over the dark blue waters, over the wide,
wide sea." How many years have gone down
under the dark blue waters, and put out to the
wide, wide sea, since I went to the play for
nothing, and saw Oberon at the St. James's
Theatre in London!

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

THE TWO GREAT MURDERS In RATCLIFF-
HIGHWAY (1811).

THERE are many events of the past and
present century—murders, wrecks, riots, trials,
i'amines, insurrections—familiar by name,but the
details of which are unknown to the younger
men of this generation. Every one has heard
something of the Luddites and their outrages;
of Thurtell the gambler, and the cruel murder
he committed; of that agonising event the burning
of the Kent East Indiaman; of the savage
execution of the Cato-street conspirators; of
the trickeries of old Patch; of the tragedy of
Spafields; but there are few who have had
either time or opportunity to collect, compare,
and read at full length, the newspapers,
pamphlets, and street ballads which refer to them.
It is only those who have, who can know
thoroughly the truth or falsehood of traditional
accounts. It is only by reading interesting or
vivifying details, that the real nature of the
social catastrophes and remarkable occurrences
of the past century can be ascertained. Some
of these pages of old Time's chronicle we would
present for reperusal.

Before gas-lights and the new police had
rendered London as safe as it is at present, the
east end of the metropolis was infested by the
dregs of the ruffianism, not merely of Europe,
but of all the world. Outlaws of all countries
sought refuge among the crews of our Indiamen,
to obtain sanctuary from pursuers, or to
earn money enough for a revel on shore.
Thievish Hindoos, cruel Malays, manslaughtering
Americans, savage Frenchmen, brutal
Germans, fiery Selavonians, butcherly Russians,
the lees and outcast of both Christendom and
savagedom, frequented the brandy-shops and low
dancing-rooms of Wapping, Stepney, Poplar,
Ratcliff-highway, and the purlieus of the Docks.
With this seething mass of villany, it could
scarcely be wondered at that a great crime
should be at last committed.

Within a few minutes of midnight, on Saturday,
December 7, 1811, Mr. Marr, a young
newly married man, keeping a smail lace and
hosier's shop at .No.29, Ratcliff-highway, sent
out his servant girl to pay a baker's bill and
to get some oysters for supper. .Mrs. Marr was
at the time in the kitchen, rocking her baby in
its cradle. The apprentice, a young ruddy Devonshire
lad, named Goven, aged fourteen, was either
busy in the shop or at work down-stairs. The
girl was alarmed as she left the house on that
peculiarly gloomy December night, by seeing
a man in a long dark coat standing in the
lamp-light on the opposite side of the street,
as if watching her master's house. The watchman,
a friend of Marr's, had also previously
noticed this mysterious man continually peeping
into the window of Marr's shop, and, thinking the
act suspicious, had gone in and told the proprietor.
A few minutes after Mary the servant left, as the
watchman was returning on his ordinary half-
hourly beat, Marr called to him to help him put
up the shutters, and the watchman then told Marr
that the man who had been skulking about had
got scared, and had not been in the street
since. In the mean time, the girl, looking in
vain for an oyster-shop still open, had wandered
from street to street and lost her way. It was
nearly half an hour before she got home;
when she arrived there, to her surprise she
found no lights visible, and no sound within the
house. She rang, and then gently knocked,
but there was no reply. She rang again, after
a pause, but violently. Presently (but we take
this fact, with some slight doubt, from Mr. De
Quincey's wonderful narrative of the tragedy)
she heard a noise on the stairs, and then
footsteps coming down the narrow passage that led
to the street door. Next, she heard some one
breathing hard at the keyhole. With a sudden
impulse of almost maniacal despair, she tore at
the bell and hammered at the knocker: partly,
perhaps, unconscious of what she did, partly
to rouse the neighbourhood and paralyse the
murderer, feeling now certain that a murder had
been committed. Mr. Parker, a pawnbroker next
door, threw up his bedroom window, and tfie
servant told him that she felt sure her master
and mistress had been murdered, and that the
murderer was even then in the, house. Mr.
Parker half dressed himself, and, armed with a
kitchen poker, vaulted over the low brick wall
of his back yard, and entered Mr. Marr's
premises. A light was still glimmering through
the half-open back door, by which the murderer
must have just escaped. The shop was floating
with blood. Marr lay dead behind the counter,
near the window, his skull shattered by blows
of a mallet, and his throat cut. The bodies of
Mrs. Marr and the apprentice, also killed in
the same way, were lying in the centre of the
shop floor. The wife had apparently been
murdered as she cameup-stairs, alarmed by the scuffle;
the apprentice boy after some resistance, for the
whole counter and even ceilingwas sprinkled wiith
his blood. Some one in the crowd suggested a
search for the child. It was found in the
kitchen, crushed and with its throat cut, the
cradle beaten to pieces, and the bed-clothes piled
over it. At this horrible aggravation of a hideous
series of crimes, the mob gave a scream of
horror. The servant, girl became speechless and
delirious, and was carried away by the
neighbours.

The murderer must have worked with terrible
swiftness and sagacity. The watchman remembered
that, a little after twelve, finding some of
Marr's shutters not quite ecure, he called to
him, and some one answered, "We know it."