unslow Heath and robbed
the mail? Have you ever entered a first-class railway carriage, where an
old gentleman sat alone in a sweet sleep, daintily murdered him, taken
his pocket-book, and got out at the next station? You know that this
circumstance occurred in France a few months since. If we have travelled
in France this autumn we may have met the ingenious gentleman who
perpetrated this daring and successful coup. We may have found him a
well-informed and agreeable man. I have been acquainted with two or
three gentlemen who have been discovered after--after the performance
of illegal actions. What? That agreeable rattling fellow we met was
the celebrated Mr. John Sheppard? Was that amiable quiet gentleman in
spectacles the well-known Mr. Fauntleroy? In Hazlitt's admirable paper,
"Going to a Fight," he describes a dashing sporting fellow who was in
the coach, and who was no less a man than the eminent destroyer of Mr.
William Weare. Don't tell me that you would not like to have met (out of
business) Captain Sheppard, the Reverend Doctor Dodd, or others rendered
famous by their actions and misfortunes, by their lives and their
deaths. They are the subjects of ballads, the heroes of romance. A
friend of mine had the house in May Fair, out of which poor Doctor Dodd
was taken handcuffed. There was the paved hall over which he stepped.
That little room at the side was, no doubt, the study where he composed
his elegant sermons. Two years since I had the good fortune to partake
of some admirable dinners in Tyburnia--magnificent dinners indeed;
but rendered doubly interesting from the fact that the house was that
occupied by the late Mr. Sadleir. One night the late Mr. Sadleir took
tea in that dining-room, and, to the surprise of his butler, went out,
having put into his pocket his own cream-jug. The next morning, you
know, he was found dead on Hampstead Heath, with the cream-jug lying by
him, into which he had poured the poison by which he died. The idea of
the ghost of the late gentleman flitting about the room gave a strange
interest to the banquet. Can you fancy him taking his tea alone in the
dining-room? He empties that cream-jug and puts it in his pocket; and
then he opens yonder door, through which he is never to pass again. Now
he crosses the hall: and hark! the hall-door shuts upon him, and his
steps die away. They are gone into the night. They traverse the sleeping
city. They lead him into the fields, where the gray