The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-06 00:00:00

HER

MAJESTY'S THEATRE.

LESSEE-MR. E. T. SMITH.

In consequence of unavoidable circumstances, the Lessee
takes the earliest opportunity of informing the subscribers
and the public that the PRODUCTION of ROBIN
HOOD is POSTPONED until Thursday next, October 11,
and has the pleasure of announcing that he has arranged to
give, in lieu, on Monday next, October 8, IL TROVA-
TORE, with the following cast :
Manrico .. Signor GIUGLINI
Il Conte di Luna • . Signor FRANCESCO BRIAN!,
(His first appearance in this country.)
Ferrando„. • .. Signor V lALETTI.
Un Zingaro Signor CASTELLI
Azucena LEMAIRE.
Inez Mdlle. BORSI.
Leonora .. • Mdlle. TITIENS.
Conductor .. Signor ARDITI
After the Opera will be sung the NATIONAL ANTHEM

•~

THE SUN.

LONDON, SATURDAY, OCT. 6, 1880.

Another phase of the Road Murder mystery has
passed away, and we know but little more than
previously. Yet it cannot be denied that the
endeavour to fix a charge, in some form, on ELIZA-
BETH GOUGH, has fixed, somewhat more definitely,
our attention on several small facts and circum-
stances, and enabled Its better to estimate their
value. The public, perhaps, will be curious to
know what was the real design of this prosecution.
Mr. SLACK, and all to whom he communicated the
result of his examinations, must have been fully
aware that no jury would convict the young
woman from the evidence adduced; for of her being
the actual murderer there was not a shadow of
proof ; and of the only other possible charges,
those of being an accomplice before or after the
fact, beyond the circumstance of her being in the
room whence the child was taken, the grounds of
suspicion were of the most doubtful character.
The result of the whole inquiry before the Magis-
trates -was more unfavourable to some of the wit-
nesses than to the young woman, and it is diffi-
cult not to believe that the real object of the pro-
ceedings was to place GoUGH in a position in
which she might be induced by confessing all she
knew to save her own life.
That the girl does know who the murderer
is, it is difficult to doubt. The child was a very
heavy one. No person could well have held him,
and have adjusted at the same time the bedclothes
of his cot with such exactness as had been used. A
man, according to the surgeon's description of the
violence used, seems, probably, to every one, to have
been the inflicter of the wounds. But no man would
have laid. the bedclothing in the order in which it
was found. Either therefore a woman and a man
entered her room and bore off the child,' arranging
first the clothing, as GOUGH says she found it, or
its arrangements must have been her work, in which
case, she„ of course, was privy to the whole transac-
tion. If Mr. SLACK had little doubt of the latter
being the truth, his strong suspicion is, perhaps,
shared, justly or not, by the majority of those who
read the evidence.

The probable manner of the child's death, from
the later xeflections of the surgeon on what he had
seen, appears somewhat clearer. The darkness
about th e month was so considerable as to make
him almost certain that if death had not been ac-
tually caused by suffocation, the 'pressure applied
to the mouth had caused pulsation to cease, before
the dreadful cut on the throat was inflicted; at least
the appearance of the mouth, coupled with the
fact that the blood had not spurted about,
rendered it almost certain that the heart had
ceased to act. The stab was undoubtedly
inflicted after death. The bloody part
of the w ork was certainly perpetrated out of the
house. But, why resorted to if the child were
suffocated ? Was it to make sure that by no acci
dent it should recover breath, and even from the
waterclo set make its cries possibly heard ? But one
or two -unknown mortals can answer this sad ques-
tion.

The chief points against the nursemaid, relied on
by the prosecution, were, First, the necessity of
two persons to leave things as they were found,
the improbability of two persons entering her room
for the purpose, and the strong presumption hence
arising, of her guilty knowledge. Second, the
discrepancy between her own statements as
to the time when she knew that the
blanket was removed from the bed. Thirdly,
the piece of chest-flannel fitting her and apparently
belonging to her, which was also found inside the
water-closet. Fourthly, The discrepancy between
her statement and Mrs. KENT'S—as to her having
tapped at her door an hour before the time when
she found her awake. Perhaps, we may add, her
statement that she saw into the cot while kneeling
on the bed, though to us this seems very trivial.
Some persons will think more of some of her own
casual remarks, most of which, however, if not
el, receive a sinister interpretation only from her
presumed guilt or complicity.

The blanket story was the most striking one of the
discrepant statements. To two policemen, FOLEY
andWOLFE, she said that she had not missed the
blanket till she saw it brought in with the body of
the child. But she told MORGAN, the parish con-
stable, before the body had been brought in, that
she had missed the blanket. The bedclothes, more-
over, were of such a form that, as they were found
in the morning, it could not have been apparent
to a person by looking at them that a
blanket had been removed. If she knew
it was missing, how did she know it ? If she
contradicted, herself respecting the time of
her knowing of the loss, why did she do it ? Could
she have ever thought of its being evidence against
her that she knew it had been taken ? This would
have been astute forethought indeed.

The most striking fact, however, to us, in the
whole evidence, is that of ELIZABETH GOUGH and
Mr. KENT .having both of them made discrepant
statements respecting this same blanket ! Mr.
KENT went off to Trowbridge before the body was
found. Yet he gave evidence that he knew the
blanket was missing—that Mrs. KENT told him of
it. How did Mrs. KENT know ? for she says she
did ; but she does not tell us how she came
by the knowledge, and the evidence tends to show
that she had not examined the clothes in the cot.
Had GOUGH told her ? But now the strange dis-
cTepancy occurs in Mr. KENT'S also, that he twice
:told FOLEY, the policeman, that he did not know
of the blanket being missing till after his returnfrom
Trowbridge. There seems no reason to doubt Fo-
-r_alY'S veracity. And if he spoke the truth the re-
rult is, that ELIZABETH GOUGH and Mr. KENT
rers,mbled each other in having both of them denied,
and both of them affirmed, knowledge of the miss
ing blanket before the body was brought in.
The single denial and affirmation of either might
well be set down to temporary confusion of recol-
lection. But that two individuals, and about the
hour, should concur in making the identical incom-
pbtible atiswers about the same thing, is one of the
tr .oat mysterious of the mysteries of this painful
usiness. It ought to be most rigidly scrutinised.
Some stress has been laid upon the assertions by
th e accused of the innocence of Miss CONSTANCE
KJ ?ST and of Mr. KENT; of her being cer-
tai a that nothing more would be found in
the. soil of the water closet; and of her

telling ELILA DALLIMORE that though the
chest flanzel fitted her, it was no reason why she
should have done the murder. But we cannot like
the manner of this witness, and strong expressions
of opinion as to how the murder was done, and by
whom, were, as the Chairman observed, nothing re-
markable when all around her were expressing
their opinions. And her manner, he remarked,
was altogether that of an innocent person, being
neither sullenly reserved, nor officious in making
communications.

Mr. KENT'S own conduct and statements are,
perhaps, as perplexing as any. Not only
the strange coincidence of contradictory assertions,
identical with the self-contradictions of GOUGH
already noticed, but his passing the parish constable
and policeman, and setting off to Trowbridge. One
of the sons, however, went for URCH, the nearest
policeman ; but whether by his father's direction is
not said. Then his locking up the police whom he
had in his house for several hours, while he walked
about, the night after the murder, so that, though
they could get out of the house, they could not get
into any other part of it ; his refusing to allow a
plan of the house to be taken ; the Newfoundland dog,
though comparatively old, not barking that morn-
ing, as he almost certainly would have done at a stran-
ger's footstep or scent—these are singular and im-
perfectly accounted for facts; and, when to these
we add the almost divining where the body would
be found by one of the two men, they induce us to
think it possible that the inquiries may, as yet, have
taken a wrong direction. The case does not remain
quite as it was. Suspicion must yet rest on one or
more inmates of the house, and may do so till the
judgment day. At the same time the supposition
of co-operation from without is not utterly without
support. More it were not just to say, at present.

The Duke of NEWCASTLE has acted with admir-
able tact and discretion throughout the whole
route traversed by H. R. H. the Prince of WALES
in the British North American possessions. His
grace is understood to have received, in regard to
the exercise of that tact and discretion, a carts
blanche (so to speak) from her Most Gracious MA-
JESTY, before H. R. H. started upon this deeply in-
teresting and unprecedented expedition. And his
grace, we must all of us admit, has justified to the
full this signal mark of the Royal confidence. The
task entrusted to him was one of exquisite respon-
sibility. It was one, moreover, in the performance
of which he could look for guidance at moments of
anxiety to no single precedent whatsoever. Upon
his own unaided judgment the onus of every suc-
cessive doubt or difficulty devolved. And though
it might have been presumed by the more sanguine
before starting that all would necessarily be, in nau-
tical parlance, "plain sailing" before the heir to the
Crown, and H. R. H.'s entourags, the late disgrace-
ful proceedings of the Orangemen of Kingston and
Toronto have proved by this time directly to the
contrary—they show that the PRINCE'S pathway
was not strown uninterruptedly with flowers—
that his Royal Highness could be, figuratively
speaking, pelted more indecorously with the
oranges of bigotry, than with any of the ordinary
mud and brickbats commonly darkening the air
at a brawl among the roughs in one of the back
slums of Billingsgate. Throughout the entire
length of the progress made by the Prince of
WALES in our British North American possessions,
from the moment when his Royal Highness first
set foot upon the opposite shores of the Atlantic, to
the time when he paused upon the frontier line
dividing the two Canadas from the United States,
his grace the Colonial Secretary has exercised an
adroitness of discrimination beyond all praise, in
conducting the proceedings of this unexampled pro-
gress of the Prince of WALES along the eastern
borders of the North American continent.

There, for the first time, the Duke's tact and
discretion seem to have suddenly left him for awhile
altogether. No great harm has come of it we ad-
mit. But it is none the less, to our thinking, a
grievous error of judgment on the part of the Colo-
nial Secretary. Allusion is made, of course, to the
circumstance naturally enough arising in the in-
stance of the Prince of WALES himself out of the
motives of simple CURIOSITY—the circumstance of
his Royal Highness countenancing, by his presence,
the foolhardy buffooneries by which that rope-danc-
ing mountebank, M. BLONDIN is latterly in the habit
of desecrating the sublime spectacle of the Falls of
Niagara ! It is hardly less than lamentable, we
cannot but think, that his Grace the Duke of NEW-
)CASTLE should have consented thus to allow
the dignity of his Royal Highness's character
to be derogated from, by its public asso-
ciation in this manner with oue of the
most puerile, and at the same time one of the
most flagrant instances ever upon record of the
One Step from the Sublime to the Ridiculous !
Does any one want an illustration of that One
Step, he may recognise it upon the instant in the
first nimble foot-tread taken by M. BLONDTN, the
French rope-dancing mountebank, along the cord
stretched above the rapids of that stupendous series
of the Niagara cataracts. The outrageous incon-
gruity, the monstrous and indefensible indecorum
of this utterly ludicrous exhibition at the Falls of
Niagara, the limes' correspondent has admirably
expressed where he writes—" To leave the study
of these eternal cataracts to witness the feats of
any rope-dancer, however skilful, is very much like
shutting your prayer book to go and witness a pan-
tomime." The correspondent might even have said
that it is rather like shutting your prayer-
book, and while holding that prayer-book still
in your hand, turning to witness the per-
formance of a pantomime, " got up" "by
particular desire," within the immediate precincts of
some sublime temple dedicated to the worship of
GOD—under the shadow, let ;us say, of our grand
old Abbey at Westminster, ox' of Notre Dame in the
Isle de Paris, or of the world's wonder among sacred
edifices, the glory of the Eternal City, the matchless
Cathedral of St. Peter's ! In the mere sound
of that everlasting voice, going up cease-
lessly from the Falls of Niagara, by night and by
day, year after year, generation after generation,
century after century—from the first hour of the
subsidence of the Deluge until now—in the mere
sound, we say, of that everlasting voice of inarticu-
late adoration there seems something like absolute
impiety in the plaudits accorded to the nonsensical
freaks of this preposterous acrobat in his parti-
coloured tights and spankled jacket ! It is like
grinning through a horse-collar by the side of a
death bed! It is like turning somersaults to the
organ tones and the choral chant of the " Halle-
lujah" of the Mount of Olives of Beethoven !
" Tread lightly—it is holy ground !"—is heard in
the roar of those everlasting falls—is visible in the
spray of those eternal cataracts. And yet there, in
answer to that bidding of nature, M. BLONDIN has
the drum and the pandean pipes and the little strip
of carpet—" treads lightly " upon chalked soles—
deems the " ground" so " holy- " that he quits terra
firma to tremble above it, if not " upon the suspen-
sion of a hair," upon the tightening of a two-inch
rope. Ask a mind, a heart, a soul like that cf
CHARLES DICKENS what are the emotions excited
by the presence of those sublime Falls of Niagara
—and then see, in your imagination, M. BLONDIN
capering upon his rope-walk over the cataract !