The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-16 00:00:00

of the body, and so being in a position to claim the
insurance money. She applied to an undertaker for a
coffin, had it brought to her house, and then " laid
out" her living but helpless husband, who, as he
states, was perfectly conscious of the whole proceed-
ing, but " in such a condition that he was unable
to help himself." One can hardly avoid a horrible
curiosity to know, if that statement is correct, of
what the victim thought. Was it of the possibility
of being buried alive ? He was then, as Mrs. Brewer
declares, either by Mrs. Brown herself or a man whom
she hired to help her, heaved still alive into the coffin,
or, as another witness affirms, laid on the trestles
andstraightened out for the grave. The scene would I
have been a subject for Callot, but to Mrs. Brown
it was an ordinary household incident. Her single
idea is not one of affection or hatred, or horror, or
gladness, or regret, but simply the physical one that
the smell of the corpse might be unpleasant, and
she therefore heaped salt upon the living body of her
husband, as she would, according to a practice usual
among the poor in certain cases, have heaped it upon
a corpse. She in fact got him ready for burial,
just as she would have prepared a meal, or heated
water " against" she wanted it, as a matter
of household detail, an arrangement to which
nothing of sacredness, or sanctity, or any emotion
whatever, attached. The single object was hurry—to
be ready when the time came, and to this end she
would not even wait for death to add the salt which
would preserve the corpse. There is a grotesquerie
of horror in the last-mentioned incident, a positive
denial of human instincts, a blank realism as of a
human being born by some strange anomaly of
nature before the soul had entered it which sill:-
passes the wildest dream of French romancers.
Eugene Sue would have rejected as incredible
even to French imaginations the things which
this woman did do, and did in a quiet, collected,
natural way. For after it had been done Mrs.
Brown took a few pence out of her husband's
clothes, put them away, placed all the medicines,
or " litter," as she probably called them, in a
closet, and then, with her living husband lying
there in his shroud laid out for the grave, washed
the room. She then warned a neighbour that her
husband was gone, and on her asking to see him
did not refuse. The neighbour, a Mrs. Brewer,
accordingly went in, found the " corpse" still
breathing, and asked for a mattress to put under
him, which the wife refused. Mrs. Brewer, certain
from the aspect of affairs that foul play was in-
tended, informed the parish authorities, and the
husband, taken out of her hands and properly fed,
is still alive. It occurred to us while reading the
report, that by a strange concatenation of chances
Mrs. Brown might still be innocent of her grotesquely-
horrible proceedings. Suppose that after the cruel
neglect shown him for some days, Brown had fallen
into a cataleptic state which his wife believed to be
death, during which she laid him out for burial, and
that he only revived on the entrance of Mrs. Brewer.
Brown himself states that although conscious of all
that was done, he was "in that state he could not
help himself," and he asked Mrs. Brewer when she
came in " Where be I?" That theory would be re-
concilable with great previous brutality, but unfor-
tunately for human nature the questions from the
Bench brought out facts inconsistent with it. The
coffin had been ordered while the man could speak,
and Mrs. Brewer had been threatened the day
previous that if she came into the room she
should be turned out, and when life was
absolutely certain, the poor wretch asking
his plaintive question, the woman still left him lying
on the boards, refusing either to lift him out or put
a mattress under him. She herself only defends
herself as to his supply of food, which she says was
sufficient, and the magistrates, with the witnesses
before them, came to the conclusion that she " was
desirous of sending her husband out of the world as
quickly as possible for the sake of £14." It seems
impossible to resist the conclusion that we have here
a woman, old, hardworking, and with sufficient self-
restraint to avoid murder, to whom nevertheless
death had absolutely no sanctity, in whom it inspired
no feeling whatsoever except a faint fear that occur-
ring from this disease it might make her room
uncomfortable. Of the absolute cruelty of the whole
proceeding we have said nothing, for cruelty after
all is common enough, and she was not worse than
Dr. Pritchard. Of its grotesquerie we have per-
haps said too much, for the grotesque is a permanent
element in ftvpry tragedy, the petty surroundings
always jarring at some point with the solemn fact.
The strange feature of the affair, a feature we have
met but twice among the crimes of the last five
years, is the absence in a person not actually starv-
ing of a feeling usually deemed instinctive. It is as
if a murderer had chosen the body of his victim for
a pillow.

THE "ECONOMIST" ON TIIE RISE IN THE RATE OF
DISCOUNT.—The present rise in the value of money
is owing to the simultaneous occurrence of three
causes. There is a sort of tide in the cash transac-
tions of the country which periodically empties and
periodically fills the Bank till. At the close of every
quarter there is a strong outgoing current. The
non-banking classes then get their money. Salaries
are paid, wages are paid, small dividends are paid ;
each of these transactions is very minute, but their
aggregate mass is very large. And it is because each
of them is minute that the whole is effective. All
rich people—all people in receipt of great incomes—
now-a-days, with scarcely an exception, keep a
banker, and their transactions are settled by cheques
in his ledger. As a rule, a rich man receives one
bit of paper—a railway coupon say—and it is
placed to his credit, and he pays away another
piece of paper—a cheque—and it is placed to
his debit ; no actual money passes. But little
people are paid in actual cash ; they take
so much from the Bank till, and until that money
is paid away to some of the banking classes it does
not find its way back to the Bank till. Speaking
generally the middle of every quarter is marked by
an incoming current towards the Bank, and the
close of every quarter by an outgoing current from
the Bank. There is a prevalent impression that on
the present occasion the efflux from the Bank of
England, at the close of the last quarter, has been
of unprecedented extent. But as far as bank notes
are concerned this is not the case. In 1863, only
two years ago, there was very nearly as large an
outgoing.
On the 23d Sept., 1863, the reserve of notes
only was £8,545,450
On the 14th October, 1863, the reserve of
notes was only

£2,144,079
And in a little while afterwards the reserve weni
still lower. Whereas now the figures are :
On the 20th September, 1865, the reserve
of notes only was £6,672,810
On the 11th October, 1865, the reserve of
notes only was 4,294,145