sorrowing old mother, says the story, expected
her son back all her life long. None the less
did she abuse loudly in the streets as a
murderer the unfortunate pastrycook, at
whose door he had left the medicine before
abandoning his home to enlist, as it afterwards
appeared that he did, in the East
India Company's service. Delicious and
horrible suspicion for the North Shields
people! Their respectable fellow-townsman,
who appeared to be so upright a man—who
went to church with the best of them, and
paid his way—was the diabolical assassin of
a doctor's boy. A boy of angelic character,
who was engaged in heroic struggles, had
been murdered for the money that his body
was worth by a demon pastrycook, who had
got up at six o'clock in the morning, and was
lying in wait to seize him when he came to
the door with a bottle of medicine. The
pastrycook had a son practising medicine
near Bradford; constables were sent off to
search his house for limbs of the victim.
Had there by chance been any dissection
then under the young doctor's hand, his
father might have been sent to the gallows
as a murderer.  The father's trade in North
Shields disappeared; his pastry spoiled in
his shop; he did not sell enough to pay the
shop-rent; and it was left then for two sons,
who had already got employment in a glass
manufactory, to support their persecuted
parents. Many representations were made
to the employers of the sons to procure their
dismissal.  The members of the ruined family
dared not resent, and could not be protected
against insult in the street.  The Burke and
Hare murders revived so bitterly the feeling
of the town against them, that their house
was mobbed every night; and they, innocent,
kindly people, were denounced as the
unconvicted Burkes and Hares of Tyneside.

But John Margetts was traced, and seven
years after his disappearance there was held
in North Shields a meeting, convened by the
magistrates and one hundred and thirty of
the clergy, gentry, and tradesmen of the town;
at which meeting evidence was produced of
the young man's enlistment in the East India
Company's service, and of his death by cholera
five years after the date of the imputed
murder.

Not only should the imputation then have
been removed, but there should have been
reparation made to the man ruined in fortune
and exposed to seven years of the most cruel
persecution by the error of his fellow-citizens.
The error had, perhaps, been pardonable;
but most unpardonable was the persistence in
it after all the truth had been most publicly
and perfectly explained. The ruin of a family
was a less matter than the ruin of a mystery.
The scandal was too interesting and familiar
to be put aside. It lived and spread, and
even found its way into our pages, by which
means an opportunity was given for a second
public refutation of the slander. In the fourth
volume of this journal, seven years ago, we
published a letter forwarded to us, with
confirmatory documents, by a member of the
persecuted family, which was then still struggling
with the difficulties into which that old
slander had plunged it. How the brood of
slander, though the parent has received a
death wound, will suck up their dying
mother's blood, making her death their life,
and eke her hurt their good, is an old story;
and it is an old cry that says, "God help the
man so wrapped in error's endless chain."
Twice labelled publicly as a most cruel libel,
morbid thirst for mystery still holds the
falsehood up, at the expense of innocent
men's lives and fortunes. A few bones, of
which it is doubtful if they are human bones
at all, are found in the course of excavation
for some cellarage on ground belonging to the
Mechanics' Institute. These are the bones
of the murdered Margetts, cry the scandal-
mongers of the town. Deprived of comfortable
evidence that they were right in their
suspicions, they now fall back on the thought
which is after all the dearest to their fancies:
that "an impenetrable mystery once more
falls over the old story." The sons of the
persecuted household have been denied the
happiness of settling themselves in families,
because they could bear no other burden than
that of supporting their afflicted parents. They
are Old Bachelors; and before long, therefore,
the family will have been extinguished
by this persecution; there will remain only a
name to leave. Experience forbids us even
now to hope that an unspotted name will be
left as the memorial of men who have borne
with Christian patience a heavy cross, and
lived without spot to their honour.

MICHELET'S BIRD

ONE of the most distinguished French
living authors has abjured, for the present,
laborious works of moral philosophy and
history, and has taken to writing what may be
called, by comparison, little books. History
never looses hold of her man. He who has
once drunk of that strong and bitter wine
will drink on to the day of his death. We may
therefore expect that the inveterate historian
will, at some future date, return to his original
craft. Meanwhile, Monsieur Michelet,
whose Priests, Women and Families made
so profound an impression in England as
well as on the continent, has produced in
quick succession three minor treatises, the
first of which is entitled L'Oiseau, The Bird.
A long introduction gives an interesting and
sentimenatl autobiography of a female friend
whom we may suppose to be Madame Michelet,
and also tells us how the stern chronicler of
troubled times was led to the study of natural
history. Not that he has presented us with
a natural history of birds, or anything
approaching to it. His subject is the Bird, as