The Express.
London, England, 1861-11-20 00:00:00

TO OUR MILDER&

SPORTING INTELLIGENCE. INTELLIGENCE.

A !ate edition of the Express in published every
evening during the racing enuon, containing the
results of the day's races.

tivirssvion drams are just DOW Go rage. For
a year past all London has crowded to see a young
girl seem to be drowned, and the startling reality
of her dying streaks has won for the piece •
European fame. Through the summer we
hardened our nerves with the spectacle of the real
dangers risked by !Suisun( and his imitators for
our amusement. As Christmas draws near, there-
fore, we may expect an unusual presentment of
counterfeit horrors. At that season, indeed, we
look to be terrified. Ghosts, murders, secret
doors, dark !anthems, crape vizors, are the natural
food with which the imagination expects to be fed
as we gather round the gleaming firelight in
the heavily-curtained room. Thrilling incidents
of fiction become for us a part of our daily life, as
the shortening days drive us inward and shut out
the cares of thu real world without. This year we
shall be critical and exacting in our demand of
startling effects. Our novelists and dramatists
will have to look to it, if they hope to make dream-
land interesting to our somewhat sated fancies.
But for the present they are thrown into the shade
by the appearance, in the reports of a Police-
court, of one of their most threadbare incidents.
The little circumstance that among the actors
were Mr. YARDLEY and Inspector Dosov•x, gives
to one of the most hackneyed devices of their art
an interest which eclipses the most novel and
highly-wrought scenes of the Lyceum or Adelphi
playwrights.

The facts, so far as the plot was developed on
Monday, are very simple. An old and invalid
lady resided in Fulham-place, Maida-hill, her
establishment consisting of two female servants,
her own maid and a cook. On the 24th of
October last, about nine in the evening, she sent
her maid down stairs to bring up her supper. Ere
the maid returned the door of the room was
opened. Two men entered, their faces concealed
with =aka, and before the old lady, sick with
terror, could gasp out a scream, one of them
secured her silence by a stunning blow on the
head. When the maid carne up-stairs with the
supper tray she saw her mistress lying bleeding
and senseless, a man stooping over her,
and another man rifling the drawers of
the dressing table. Flinging down the tray
she rushed screaming to the stairs. The men
rushed past her, opened the front door, and
escaped. So much is certain. The rest of the
story stands as yet on insufficient evidence, and
must be for the present taken with some grains of
doubt. The cook deposed that a little before her
fellow-servant came down for her mistress's sup-
per she had admitted into the house a woman of
the name of Cotter, who had acted as nurse to
her mistress during the preceding winter. This
woman, after being a few minutes in the house,
proposed to go out for some gin, and borrowed
the latchkey that she might let herself
in on her return. When she came back
she threw the key ostentatiously on the table,
and desired them to observe that she had re-
turned it. At this time the old lady's maid was
in the kitchen, waiting to take up the supper.
When the maid had gone up-stairs, and the crash of
the tray was heard, the cook made an exclamation,
but CoLLZY said " it wee nothing." When, imme-
diately after, the alarm was raised, COLLEY called
the hearers loudly to witness that she was inno-
cent. To the police officer who subtequently ap-
prehended her she gave various and contradictory
accounts of what she had done that evening. She
was, therefore, placed in the dock, along with two
men who had been concerned in seem
former robberies of plate, and who had
been observed in the neighbourhood of
Fulham-place about the time of the bur-
glary. Against them, however, the er.denoe of
identification is as yet very Unperfect—the old lady
being too ill to attend the court, and her adamant
naturally enough being uncertain of the appearance
of the men whom she had so suddenly and im-
perfectly seen.

Such is thu outline of • story which would seem
natural and ordinary enough if told of some lonely
house by a heath, but which is sufficiently startling
when the scene is a how.* in a frequented, gar
lighted, and police-watched street in Londoe.
Whatever may be the ultimate success of the
cificiahi in detecting the individuals guilty of
the crime, it is beyond doubt that the crime
was committed, and committed by means
so simple, that, as Hr. YARDLEY remarked,
none of us can be assured that we mir-
es/vim rest in safety from • similar attempt.
Taking the evidence of the cook to be true (and if
it is not true it would only make the difference
that she henelf wee the guilty party instead of the
woman she accused), we have the fact that at an
early hour in the evening, when all the world was
still astir, a woman !whom character had been
vouched so far that she bad been for months a
trusted inmate of the house, opens the front door,
gives admisaion to a couple of ruffians, who walk
upstairs, and in the brief absence of the attendant
nearly murder the mistrals of the bowie in herown
bedroom, and are within an ace of escaping with their
booty. Against such contingencies it is evident we
are all defenceless. We can do no more than in-
quire the previous character of our servants; we
cannot secure that their character shall not change
even while in our son We ; we cannot, with every