The Sun.
London, England, 1862-11-01 00:00:00

eonalnittea. During the night between Friday
the 4th of July and Saturday the sth of July,

ought to be a firm and even-handed, and consistent,
and inexorable award of punishmenti

the unfortunate victim, JESSIE MTHERSON, a poor

serving-woman, thirty-five years of age, was
murdered with the most brutal violence, having
been chopped to death with blows from a cleaver, on
the kitchen floor of No. 17, Sandyford• place, Glas-
gow. JESSIE M`LACHLAN, immediately know-
ledge of the murder bas been ascertained, is
proved to have pawned certain plate, known

The great game question is still discussed with
vigour in Norfolk. Mr. HOWE, one of the county
members, it will be remembered, was almost hooted
down at the North Walsham agricultural meeting
for avowing that he suprorted the Night Poaching
Act in the late session. Mr. C. S. READ was as
vehemently cheered for telling the landlords present
some home truths on their treatment of the tenant
farmers, of whom Mr. READ is one, and especially
on this matter of game. Mr. HOWE, apparently
taken quite aback at finding a tenant farmer not
afraid to speik out, though pressed to reply, de-
ferred doing so till " a more convenient season."
The convenient season, for a wonder, actually
came. At another agricultural meeting, held not
far off, Mr. HoWE, who had, of course, been study-
ing his speech all this time, delivered his defence—
it was, however, but a lame story. He had to con-
fess that Norfolk did not need the bill, and thus
apologised for any apparent insult to Norfolk
farmers. But his chief object was to defend game-
laws; and the chief defence was that game brought
the squires down into the coantry, and kept them

to have been stolen from the house in which
her unhappy friend had been butchered.
Clothes belonging to the deceased are found

in the possession of the accused JESSIE

111‘ LACHLAN. Her own clothes, the raiment
which she had worn on the day of the

murder, were found bloodstained and torn up into

shreds in the field some distance from Glasgow

several days afterwards. JESSIE M`LACHLAN,
however, declares, in spite of these facts, that she

has no knowledge whatever of what has occur-
red ; that upon the night of the murder she never
went near the house in which it was perpetrated,
sleeping in her own bed, in her own room, far away
from 17, Sandyford-place. She persists in these
statements until the jury have declared her
guilty, and then, before the Judge can
pronounce sentence upon her, then, but not before
then, she delivers in a formal cut-and-dried state-

there ; and what a loss would the country
suffer if they were to become absentees,
The worthy member seemed to forget how much
was assumed in his argument-Ist, The value of
resident proprietors; 2d, their being drawn to their
estates by game only—a rather poor compliment
to their sense and patriotism; 3d, the impossibility
of preserving game except by artificial, cruel, and
unnatural laws. Country squires, are not, how-
ever, much famed far beyond the immediate objects.
Mr. C. S. READ, however, was also fully pre-
pared for a reply. After reading the landlords an
honest and practical lesson on their taking the
highways out of the ratepayers' hands by their
new Highway Act, and thus placing in the hands
of the magistrates the power to tax the unrepre-
sented parishes, he returned to his old charge
on the game laws. He denounced, amidst
loud cheers, hares as ruinous to the farmer, and

ment of a totally different kind—giving the lie to
all her former declarations—declaring that she does
know all about the atrocity of which she has been
accused—giving the most minute account of how it
had been perpetrated by the old man (tetat. 87!),
Mr. JOHN FLEMING, recounting his motives even for
doing it, and the manner in which, and
the threats by which the hoary mur-

derer had compelled her to become parti-
ceps criminzs, as an accomplice after the fact
pledged to its concea Iment. Nobody can have for-
gotten the emphatic declaration with which the
Judge swept aside the whole of this specious but
too-ingenious statement of the m urderess.. " I never
knew an instance," said he, "in which the state.
ments made by prisoners after their conviction were
anything else than, in their substance, falsehoods."
A writer in the current number of the Cornhtle after
a most careful analysis of all the various particu-
lars brought forward in evidence during the four
days' trialof JESSIE NPLACHLAN, on the 18th, 19th,
20th, and 22d of last September, thus sums up the
case against the accused according to that same
evidence :

rabbits as nothing but vermin. Pheasants were a
costly luxury, but partridges were more beneficial
than irjurious to the farmer, and excellent sport.
But as to the new law, it was an attempt to make
the police gamekeepers at the public expense. Mr.
READ was willing to have a good trespass law—he
did not object to game being made property—but
he insisted that as the game on a farm or an
estate would let at a certain sum per annum, it

" The murder was probably committed by a worn en with
a foot like hers, on Saturday morning, towards four o'clock,
for the sake of stealing the plate and dresses. She was out
of her own home all that night. She was next day
in possession of the plate and dresses. Her clothes
were stained with blood, and she took steps to
conceal them. She gave a false account of the way in
which her time was spent, a barely credible account
of the way in which she got the plate, an improbable ac-
count of the way in which she got the clothes, and some-
thing which amounted to no accoont at all of her reasons
for disposing as she did of her own clothes. The elaborate
evidence given at the trial all condenses itself into this
short statement, and no one can be surprised that after a
quarter of an hour's consideration she should have been
unanimously convicted by the jury of murder and theft."
On the other hand the writer in the Cornhal
observes, in regard to the infamous charges now
directed against Mr. JOHN FLEMTNG by the woman
still under sentence of death (but twice respited),
that—

ought to be assessed to the rates to that amount

if it employed the police to protect it. He was also
for charging the expense of game prosecutions on
the preservers of game. Evidently we shall have
a little warm discussion on the matter next session.

THE StTN, LONDOII, SATISItDAY EVE XING, NOVrAIBER 1, 1862.