this Saturday, March 13, the house of a Mr.
Stamper, a solicitor of Dunedin, had been broken into, and some articles
of value, among them a pair of opera glasses, stolen. The house had been
set on fire, and burned to the ground. On the morning of the following
day, Sunday, the 14th, Dunedin was horrified by the discovery of a far
more terrible crime, tigerish certainly in its apparent ferocity. In a
house in Cumberland Street, a young married couple and their little baby
were cruelly murdered and un{sic}{an??} unsuccessful attempt made to
fire the scene of the crime.

About half-past six on Sunday morning a man of the name of Robb, a
carpenter, on getting out of bed, noticed smoke coming from the house
of a neighbor of his, Mr. J. M. Dewar, who occupied a small one-floored
cottage standing by itself in Cumberland Street, a large and broad
thoroughfare on the outskirts of the town. Dewar was a butcher by trade,
a young man, some eighteen months married, and father of a baby girl.
Robb, on seeing smoke coming from Dewar's house, woke his son, who was
a member of the fire brigade. The latter got up, crossed the street,
and going round to the back door, which he found wide open, entered the
house. As he went along the passage that separated the two front rooms,
a bedroom and sitting-room, he called to the inmates to get up. He
received no answer, but as he neared the bedroom he heard a "gurgling"
sound. Crawling on his hands and knees he reached the bedroom door, and
two feet inside it his right hand touched something. It was the body of
a woman; she was still alive, but in a dying condition. Robb dragged
her across the passage into the sitting-room. He got some water, and
extinguished the fire in the bedroom. On the bed lay the body of Dewar.
To all appearances he had been killed in his sleep. By his side was
the body of the baby, suffocated by the smoke. Near the bed was an
axe belonging to Dewar, stained with blood. It was with this weapon,
apparently, that Mr. and Mrs. Dewar had been attacked. Under the bed was
a candlestick belonging also to the Dewars, which had been used by
the murderer in setting fire to the bed. The front window of the
sitting-room was open, there were marks of boot nails on the sill, and
on the grass in front of the window a knife was found. An attempt
had been made to ransack a chest of drawers in the bedroom, but some
articles of jewellery lying in one of the drawers, and a ring on the
dressing