was born deaf and dumb. He was mischievous
and ungovernable from his birth. His cruelty
to animals, birds, and to other children, was
intense. Any living thing that he could torture
appeared to yield him delight. With savage
pastures and jabbering moans he haunted the
rocks along the shore, and seemed like some
uncouth creature cast up by the sea. When
he was only six years old, he was found one
day upon the brink of a tall cliff, bounding
with joy, and pointing downward towards the
beach with convulsions of delight. There, mangled
by the fall, and dead, they found the body
of a neighbour's child of his own age, who was
his frequent companion, and whom, as it was
inferred, he had drawn towards the steep
precipice, and urged over by stratagem or force.
The spot where this occurred was ever
afterwards his favourite haunt. He would draw the
notice of any passer-by to the place, and then
point downward where the murdered child was
found with fierce exultant mockery. It was a
saying evermore in the district, that, as a judgment
on his father's cruelty, his child had been
born without a human soul. He lived to be the
pestilent scourge of the neighbourhood.

But the end arrived. Money had become scarce,
and the resources of the cave began to fail. More
than one armed king's cutter were seen day and
night hovering off the land. Foreigners visited
the house with tidings of peril. So he, "who
came with the water, went with the wind." His
disappearance, like his arrival, was commemorated
by a turbulent storm. A wrecker, who had
gone to watch the shore, saw, as the sun went
down, a full-rigged vessel standing off and on.
By-and-by a rocket hissed up from the Gull
Rock, a small islet with a creek on the landward
side which had been the scene of many a run of
smuggled cargo. A gun from the ship answered
it, and again both signals were exchanged. At
last a well-known and burly form stood on the
topmost crag of the island rock. He waved his
sword, and the light flashed back from the steel.
A boat put off from the vessel, with two hands at
every oar; for the tide runs with double violence
through Harty Race. They neared the rocks,
rode daringly through the surf, and were steered
by some practised coxswain into the Gull Creek.
There they found their man. Coppinger leaped
on board the boat, and assumed the command.
They made with strong efforts for their ship.
It was a path of peril through that boiling surf.
Still, bending at the oar like chained giants,
the man watched them till they forced their
way through the battling waters. Once, as
they drew off the shore, one of the rowers,
either from ebbing strength or loss of courage,
drooped at his oar. In a moment a cutlass
gleamed over his head, and a fierce stern stroke
cut him down. It was the last blow of Cruel
Coppinger. He and his boat's crew boarded the
vessel, and she was out of sight in a moment,
like a spectre or a ghost. Thunder, lightning,
and hail ensued. Trees were rent up by the
roots around the pirate's abode. Poor Dinah
watched, and held in her shuddering arms her
idiot-boy, and, strange to say, a meteoric stone,
called in that country a storm-bolt, fell through
the roof into the room, at the very feet of
Cruel Coppinger's vacant chair.

MRS. WINSOR'S VIEWS OF CRIMINAL
                            LAW.

THE world has not forgotten certain recent
trials for murder in the western counties. The
"quiet west country" has obtained of late an
unenviable notoriety in that line. What change
has come over the spirit of Arcadia?

The spring assize of last year (1865), on the
Western Circuit, was especially remarkable for
two trials, which must henceforth rank among
the most noted of our "causes célèbres." Had
Thomas de Quincey been yet alive they might
have enriched our literature with a supplementary
treatise on "Murder as one of the Fine
Arts." What a companion-picture the histories
of Constance Kent and Charlotte Winsor would
have formed to the terribly dramatic Marr
murders!*

* A recent article in ALL THE YEAR ROUND has
directed public attention to that singular story.

Constance Kent and Charlotte Winsor were
no criminals of the whining kind. The poleaxe,
anti-cattle-plague methods of action that Mr.
Williams affected, were child's play, compared
to the deadly dealings of those assassins of the
softer sex. As for the Road murderess, to
this hour there are hundreds who refuse to
believe in the guilt of the self-accused criminal.
The indiscretions of the clergyman who
received her confession were sufficiently punished
by the magistrates, who wouldn't let him be a
martyr. It was he who brought so hard a
heart, so perverted a mind, and so stubborn a
will, to acknowledge the need, if not of repentance,
of atonement. In that last word is to be
found the key to the whole story of Constance
Kent. To exact atonement for the imagined
wrong done to her mother, she resolutely
destroyed what the supposed author of that
wrong loved best on earth. To atone for that
crime to the world, to the father whose life
she had blasted with the public belief in his
guilt, she came forward as resolutely to offer
her own life. There is a strange fascination
in reflecting on that character; a character
which, if the writer's theory be correct, would
have won for its possessor a foremost place
among those whom primitive and savage races
delight to honour. And yet the face of
Constance Kent expressed to those who studied it
at her trial only one characteristic:—stupidity.

A very different criminal was Mrs. Charlotte
Winsor. The woman did not live in the sort of
abode which a vivid imagination might picture
as the retreat of such a monster. A comfortable
cottage, visible from the windows of the South
Devon train as it approaches Torquay, was the
scene of her peculiar industry—an industry
exercised, it is said, not only in that line which
has made her famous. The story goes that
she used to give "entertainments" of a peculiar