thrust out to give him a
congratulatory shake--but presto! with a maniac's own quickness and
a maniac's own fury the lunatic assassin of Richardson fell upon his
friends with teeth and nails, boots and office furniture, and the
amazing rapidity with which he broke heads and limbs, and rent and
sundered bodies, till nearly a hundred citizens were reduced to mere
quivering heaps of fleshy odds and ends and crimson rags, was like
nothing in this world but the exultant frenzy of a plunging, tearing,
roaring devil of a steam machine when it snatches a human being and
spins him and whirls him till he shreds away to nothingness like a "Four
o'clock" before the breath of a child.

The destruction was awful. It is said that within the space of eight
minutes McFarland killed and crippled some six score persons and tore
down a large portion of the City Hall building, carrying away and
casting into Broadway six or seven marble columns fifty-four feet long
and weighing nearly two tons each. But he was finally captured and sent
in chains to the lunatic asylum for life.

(By late telegrams it appears that this is a mistake.--Editor Express.)

But the really curious part of this whole matter is yet to be told. And
that is, that McFarland's most intimate friends believe that the very
next time that it ever occurred to him that the insanity plea was not a
mere politic pretense, was when the verdict came in. They think that the
startling thought burst upon him then, that if twelve good and true men,
able to comprehend all the baseness of perjury, proclaimed under oath
that he was a lunatic, there was no gainsaying such evidence and that he
UNQUESTIONABLY WAS INSANE!

Possibly that was really the way of it. It is dreadful to think that
maybe the most awful calamity that can befall a man, namely, loss of
reason, was precipitated upon this poor prisoner's head by a jury that
could have hanged him instead, and so done him a mercy and his country a
service.

POSTSCRIPT-LATER

May 11--I do not expect anybody to believe so astounding a thing,
and yet it is the solemn truth that instead of instantly sending the
dangerous lunatic to the insane asylum (which I naturally supposed they
would do, and so I prematurely said they had) the court has actually SET
HIM AT LIBERTY. Comment is unnecessary. M. T.

THE EUROPEAN WARS--[From the Buffalo Express, July 25, 1870.]

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