The Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1860-08-21 00:00:00

GALLAGHER, THE WIFE MURDERER.

THE dismal portals of the tomb present a ghastly
aspect, even when revealed to the mind's eye
amid the flickering glimpses of that twilight
which surrounds the expiring instincts of nature.
How unutterably more repellant and hideous
seem those grim gates of death, when to mental
vision they are unfolded in the full blaze of the
noontide of life, while in conscious possession of
health, sense, and vitality. Disease may so rack
and exhaust the spirit that dissolution promises the
only relief from pres'ent torment ; but to be deprived
of existence, when the pulse beats high with life
and a feeling of all its capabilities and hopes, and
that, by a cool, deliberate and leisurely process
which makes the approaching catastrophe for a
time as visible as it is certain, must produce, in
the mind of the guilty convict, untold and incom-
municable horrors. To die a victim to the law,
ignominiously suspended on a common rope, and
to have one's dying convulsions thus made a holi-
day spectacle of, for the vulgar, is to most men a
fate more severe by far than years,—nay, than a
whole lifetime of unres'ealed miseries in the hulks
or on the bleak and cheerless shores of Western
Australia. Yet such is the gloomy fate,—the
inevitable doom—of a wretched, ignorant, and
debased creature who now lies in our county

gaol, awaiting execution.
Who can read the record of the deathbed scene
of MARY GALLAGHER without feeling that this
crime of wife-murder is one of the most atrocious
for which man was ever sentenced to death.
Albeit somewhat " unused to the melting mood,"
we might find some excuse for dropping a tear
over so touching a scene. There lay the wounded
wife, through whose gaping wounds, inflicted
without provocation, life was fast ebbing; and
yonder stood he who had done the foul deed.
The authorities and officers of justice quietly
steal around her dying couch, and whisper their
inquiries as to the fatal scene. The moribund
object of their care was still sufficiently alive to
understand their object and the purport of
their questionings. She endeavoured faithfully
to narrate the incidents of the murderous
onslaught, as far as its suddenness had left
her consciousness to know .or to remember it.
While thus simply uttering her recollections of
the facts, she seemed chiefly anxious lest any-
thing should befal the unhappy man. The long-
abused and now murdered wife, hovering on the
margin of the grave, was still a true woman, and
showed all a woman's devotion, regardless of
every consideration of self—showing, under cir-
cumstances which forbid any idea of insincerity or
of designing policy, that spirit of pure submissive-
ness, and that mercifully forgiving heart, which
sublime female human nature until it approaches
the perfect—the divine. It must do every one
good to realise the picture, and, as it were,
hear her earnest words, as before her death she
closed her statement to the magistrate with a
warm expression of feeling—"l do not wish to
do anything to him ; I forgive him with all
my heart." These tender words need -no com-
ment. " How angelic she—and he, how much
the blacker devil," that could have murdered a
wife so faithful and forbearing.
She, whose body, bearing so many mortal
gashes, now lies mouldering in a pauper's grave,
only five short years ago was the winsome,
happy, hopeful bride of him who brandished the
fatal knife whose strokes deprived her of existence.
He who so recently vowed to honour, cherish,
and protect that woman, now stands convicted by
his country of having foully slaughtered and
murdered her, without provocation. The humble
bridal chamber stands forth to the imagination in
awful contrast to the last scene in which the
husband slew the wife and mother. As the wife
of a poor man and the mother of his two chil-
dren, no doubt often struggling hard for the
barest means of subsistence, she surely deserved
some other recompense from him than that of
being barbarously attacked and sent, almost with-
out warning, to her long account. Who has seen
aught of the vicissitudes and trials of humble
married life without learning that woman is the
greater sufferer from the privations and sorrows
that poverty and want of employment; from
whatever cause, inflict upon the families of
the poor ; and who that has read the
report of the trial can doubt that MARY
GALLAGHER had patiently submitted to much
that was exhausting and exasperating in the
extreme, without a murmur that was unrea-
sonable or unduly provoking ? Even after she
must have felt that she had received her death
wounds from him who was bound to protect her,