n his wife. As if
to help this cruel plan, the young lady has developed a sentimental
affection for her relative. The wife goes to America, the husband
marries the young lady. He commences to poison her, but, in the presence
of her youth, beauty and affection for him, relents, hesitates to commit
a possibly unnecessary crime. He decides to forget and ignore utterly
his wife who is waiting patiently in America. A year passes. The
expectant wife gets no sign of her husband's existence. She comes back
to Europe, visits under a false name the town in which her faithless
husband and his bride are living, discovers the truth and divulges the
intended crime to the authorities. A sentence of penal servitude for
life rewards this perfidious criminal.(9)

(9) Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.

Derues said to a man who was looking at a picture in the Palais de
Justice: "Why study copies of Nature when you can look at such a
remarkable original as I?" A judge once told the present writer that he
did not go often to the theatre because none of the dramas which he saw
on the stage, seemed to him equal in intensity to those of real life
which came before him in the course of his duties. The saying that truth
is stranger than fiction applies more forcibly to crime than to
anything else. But the ordinary man and woman prefer to take their crime
romanticised, as it is administered to them in novel or play. The true
stories told in this book represent the raw material from which works
of art have been and may be yet created. The murder of Mr. Arden of
Faversham inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some critics
to Shakespeare. The Peltzer trial helped to inspire Paul Bourget's
remarkable novel, "Andre Cornelis." To Italian crime we owe Shelley's
"Cenci" and Browning's "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Manning was the
original of the maid Hortense in "Bleak House." Jonathan Wild, Eugene
Aram, Deacon Brodie, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright have all been made
the heroes of books or plays of varying merit. But it is not only in its
stories that crime has served to inspire romance. In the investigation
of crime, especially on the broader lines of Continental procedure, we
can track to the source the springs of conduct and character, and come
near to solving as far as is humanly possible the mystery of human
motive. There is always and must be in every crime a terra incognita
which, unless we could enter into the