The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-05-21 00:00:00

and wailing shrieks which rose above the elements, in
tones that were carried off rapidly in the blast, until they
died away in the darkness that lay behind the surrounding
hills. Had not the house been in a solitary situation, and
the hour the dead of night, any person sleeping within a
moderate distance must have heard them, for such a cry
of sorrow rising into a yell of despair was almost sufficient
to have awakened the dead. It was lost, however, upon
the hearts and ears that heard it : to them, though in jus-
tice be it said, to only comparatively a few of them, it ap-
peared as delightful as the tones of soft and entrancing
music.
The claims of the surviving sufferers were now modi-
fied; they supplicated merely to suffer death by the wea-
pons of their enemies; they were willing to bear that,
provided they should be allowed to escape from the
flames ; but no—the horrors of the conflagration were
calmly and malignantly gloried in by their merciless as-
sassins, who deliberately flung them back into all their
tortures. In the course of a few minutes a man appeared
upon the side-wall of the house, nearly naked ; his figure,
as he stood against the sky in horrible relief, was so
finished a picture of woebegone ',golly nd supplication,
that it is yet as distinct in my me ..; t sif I were again
present at the scene. Every mt s now in motion by
the powerful agitation of his But rigs, stood out upon
his limbs and neck, giving him an appearance of desperate
strength, to which by this time he must have been wrought
up ; the perspiration poured from his frame, and the veins
and arteries of his neck were inflated to a surprising thick-
ness. Every moment he looked down into the flames
which were rising to where he stood ; and as he looked,
the indescribable horror which flitted over his features
might have worked upon the devil himself to relent. His
words were few :
" My child," said he, " is still safe, she is an infant, a
young crathur that never harmed you nor any one—she is
still safe. Your mothers, your wives, have young innocent
ebildhre like it. Oh, spare her, think for a moment that
it's one of your own: spare it, as you hope to meet a just
God, or if you don't, in mercy shoot me first—put an end
to me, before I see her burned !"
The Captain approached him coolly and deliberately.
" You'll prosecute no one now, you bloody informer,"
said he : " you'll convict no more boys for takin' an ould
gun an' pistol from you, or for givin' you a neighbourly
knock or two into the bargain."
Just then, from a window opposite him, proceeded the
shrieks of a woman, who appeared at it, with the infant
in her arms. She herself was almost scorched to death ;
but, with the presence of mind and humanity of her sex,
she was about to put the little babe out of the window.
The Captain noticed this, and with characteristic atrocity,
thrust, with a sharp bayonet, the little innocent, along
with the person who endeavoured to rescue it, into the
red flames, where they both perished. This was the work
of an instant. Again he approached the man: " Your
child is a coal now," said he, with deliberate mockery ; " I
pitched it in myself, on the point of this,"—showing the
bayonet—" an' now is your turn,"—saying which, he
clambered up, by the assistance of his gang, who stood with
a front of pikes and bayonets bristling to receive the
wretched man, should he attempt, in his despair, to throw
himself from the wall. The Captain got up, and placing
the point of his bayonet against his shoulder, flung him
into the fiery element that raged behind him. He ut-
tered one wild and terrific cry, as be fell back, and no

more. After this nothing was heard but the crackling
of the fire, and the rushing of the blast : all that had pos-
sessed life within were consumed, amounting either to
eight or eleven persons.
When this was accomplished, those who took an active
part in the murder, stood for some time about the confla-
gration • and as it threw its red light upon their fierce
faces and rough persons, soiled as they now were with
smoke and black streaks of ashes, the scene seemed to be
changed to hell, the murderers to spirits of the damned,
rejoicing over the arrival and the torture of some guilty
soul. The faces of those who kept aloof from the slaugh-
ter were blanched to the whiteness of death : some of them

fainted, and others were in such agitation that they were
compelled to lean on their comrades. They became ac-
tually powerless with horror: yet to such a scene were
they brought by the pernicious influence of Ribbonism.
It was only when the last victim went down, that the
conflagration shot up into the air with most unbounded
fury. The house was large, deeply thatched, and well
furnished ; and the broad red pyramid rose up with fear-
ful magnificence towards the sky. Abstractedly it had
sublimity, but now it was associated with nothing in my
mind but blood and terror. It was not, however, without a
purpose that the Captain stood to contemplate its effect.
" Boys," said he, " we had better be sartin that all's safe ;
who knows but there might be some of the sarpents
crouchin' under a hape o' rubbish, to come out and gibbet
us to-morrow or next day : we had better wait awhile,
anyhow, if it was only to see the blaze."
Just then the flames rose majestically to a surprising
height. Our eyes followed their direction ; and we per-
ceived, for the first time, that the dark clouds above, to-
gether with the intermediate air, appeared to reflect back,
or rather to have caught the red hue of the fire. The
hills and country about us appeared with an alarming dis-
tinctness : but the most picturesque part of it was the ef-
fect of reflection of the blaze on the floods that spread
over the'surrounding plains. These, in fact, appeared to
be one broad mass of liquid copper, for the motion of the
breaking waters caught from the blaze of the high waving
column, as reflected in them, a glaring light, which eddied,
and rose, and fluctuated, as if the flood itself had been a
lake of molten fire.

Fire, however, destroys rapidly. In a short time the
flames sank—became weak and flickering—bye and bye,
they shot out only in fits—the crackling of the timbers
died away—the surrounding darkness deepened—and ere
long, the faint light was overpowered by the thick volumes
of smoke that rose from the ruins of the house, and its
murdered inhabitants.

_"Now, boys," said the Captain, "all is safe—we may
go. Remember, every man of you, what you've sworn
this night, on the book and altar of God—not on a heretic
Bible. If you perjure yourselves, you may hang us; but
let me tell you, for your comfort, that if you do, there is
them livin' that will take care the lase of your own lives
will be but short.

After this we dispersed every man to his own home.
Reader,—not many months elapsed ere I saw the bo-
dies of this Captain, whose name was Patrick Devann,

and all those who were actively concerned in the perpetra-

Lion of this deed of horror, withering in the wind, where
they hung gibbetted, near the scene of their nefarious vil-

lainy ; and while I inwardly thanked Heaven for my own
narrow and almost undeserved escape, I thought in my
heart how seldom, even in this world, ustice fails to over-
take the murderer, and to enforce the righteous judgment

of God—that " s'vhososheddeth man'i blood, by man

shall his blood be shed."

Ir.* This tale of terror is, unfortunately, too true. The scene
of hellish murder detailed in it lies at Wildgoose Lodge, in the
county of Louth, within about four miles of Carrickmacross,
and nine of Dundalk. No such multitudinous murder has oc-
curred, under similar circumstances, except the burning of the
Sheas, in the county of Tipperary. The name of the family
burned in Wildgoose Lodge was Lynch. One of them had,
shortly before this fatal night, prosecuted and convicted some
of the neighbouring Ribbonmen, who visited him with severe
marks of their displeasure, in consequence of his having refused
to enrol himself as a member of, their body. The language of
the story is partly fictitious; but the facts are pretty closely
`such as were developed during the trial of the murderers. Both
parties were Roman Catholics, and either twenty-five or twenty-
eight of those who took an active part in the burning were
hanged and gibbeted in different parts of the county of Louth.
Devann, the ringleader, hung for some months in chains, within
about a hundred yards of his own house, and about half a mile
fr }m Wildgoose Lodge. His mother could neither go into nor
ou- of her cabin, without seeing his body swinging from the
gibbet. Her usual exclamation, on looking at him, was—" God
be good to the sowl of my poor marthyr I " The peasantry,
too, frequently exclaimed, on seeing him, Poor Paddy I " A
gloomy fact that speaks volumes I

ARTESIAN WELLS.—Olympiodortis, who flourished in
the sixth century, relates that wells of two, three, and
five hundred feet deep were pierced in the Oasis, and that
the rivers of water which gushed forth, served to water
the plains. In Italy too, among the ruins of the ancient
town of Modena, lead tubes sixty or seventy feet deep
have been discovered, the only use of which appears to
have been to penetrate below the bad and unwholesome
water of the surface, into the limpid and pure bed be-
neath, by which the modern town to this present day is
supplied. The most ancient Artesian well in France is at
Litters, in Artois, in the convent of the Chartreux ; it
dates from 1126. Stuttgard also contains some ancient
Artesian wells. Shaw, who was in Barbary in 1727, in
speaking of the villages of Wadreag, in Sahara, says,
" The inhabitants procure water in a singular manner.
They dig wells 100 and sometimes 200 fathoms deep, and
never fail in finding a great abundance of water. For this
purpose they remove different layers of sand and gravel,
until they find a kind of stone, resembling slate, and
which they know to be exactly above what they call Ballar
tdfit el Erd, or the sea under the rock, a name which
they apply to the waters in general. This stone is easily
pierced, when the water rises so suddenly, and in such
great abundance, that they who descend to effect this ope-
ration are sometimes taken by surprise and drowned, al-
though*they endeavour to escape as quickly as possible."
About the end of the 17th century, Dominic Cassini con.
strutted an Artesian fountain at Fort Urbain, the water of
which played fifteen feet above the earth ; or if led by a
tube, it ascended to the summit of the houses. These
facts, therefore, establish the antiquity of the art.—
London Polytechnic Magazine.
CRIME IN LANCASHIRE.—It has long been known,
that in consequence of the relaxation of the severity of
our criminal code, and the astonishing increase of serious
crimes which cannot be passed over, a vast number of
criminals are now disposed of in the police courts, and ne-
ver appear in the criminal returns at all, who, twenty
years ago, were deemed felons of the very highest class,
and visited often with death, always with transportation.
It was stated in parliament as a subject of complaint
against the Lancashire magistrates, that during the insur-
rection of 1842 in that county, nearly ten thousand per-
sons were imprisoned, and let go after a short confine-
ment, without ever being brought to trial. During the
disturbances in the same year, in Lanarkshire and many
other counties of Scotland, (especially Ayrshire, Fife, and
Mid-Lothian,) the accumulation of prisoners was so great,
that not only were none detained for trial but those against
whom the evidence was altogether conclusive; but that
great numbers were remitted for trial before the summary
tribunals, and escaped with a month or two of imprison-
ment, who had committed capital crimes, and a few years
before would infallibly have been transported for fourteen
years. We are getting on so fast, that nothing is more
common now than to see hardened criminals, both in Eng-
land and Scotland, disposed of by the
police magistrates,
and for capital crimes received a few months' imprison-
ment. Their names and crimes never appear in the re-
turns at all. There is no 'fault attaches to any one for
this seeming laxity. The thing is unavoidable. If the
class of cases were all sent to the higher tribunals which
formerly were considered privative to them, the judges,
were they twice as numerous as they are, would sit in the
criminal courts from one year's end to another, and the
jails would still be choked up with untried criminals,
numbers of whom would linger for years in confinement.
Blackwood.