Blandford Weekly News. — 1889-01-19 (Blandford, Dorset, England)

WHY I MILLED MARRIOTT. "I am to die in twenty-four hours' time, and I make this statement for the purpose of enabling all those whose opinion I value to form their own conclusion upon the heinousness of the crime of which I own myBelt guilty, and for which I am prepared to die. "Nineteen years ago, when I had just entered the medical profession, I went West in order to gain experience by assisting a relative, who was doing well as a general practitioner at Louisville. It was there that I came to know, and before long to love, Grace Haggett, the only daughter of Joe Haggett, who kept what was then the principal hotel in Louisville. " Let it rot be supposed that Grace Haggett was any common drinking-saloon Hebe. Beautiful indeed she was—not in my eyes alone, but in those of every man whose privilege it was to see her. But it was not for that I loved her—or, at least, not for that 'alone. It was rather for her modesty, her sweetness, the promise I saw, or thought I saw, in her of true and tender womanhood. "She was not for me. I learned the bitter truth from her own lips when we had known one another for a few months, and I did what I could to bear it man. fvlly. I could not leave the place at once; but when I found there was no hope for me,' I did my best to hide from her what I felt, and summoned up what fortitude I could against the worst trial, which I knew must come, when some other should step into the place denied to me. Little did I imagine in what shape that trial was to come. "It was a year or more after the time that I first learned my fate when the man Marriott came across her life and mine. He had recently come into a large property, and, having exhausted all the pleasures he could find in his own country, had travelled westward in search of sport and the excitement of life ins younger stage of civilization. He stayed at Joe Haggett's, and there he found enough attraction to keep him among us for many weeks. I only know the outlines of the story, and have not the heart to tell it if I knew more. By what deceit and devilry he gained his ends the reader most guess. Enough to say that one morning Louisville awoke to learn that Marriott and Grace Haggett were gone. She left behind her a letter, in which she said that she was going to England with him, where—such was the fiction by which he seemed to have accomplished her ruin—they were Lobe married as soon as certain family difficulties which prevented his taking that step now had been removed. "Two years later she came back—to die. It hapyened that I was in sole charge of our surgery on the winter's night when she returned. I was summoned hurriedly to Haggett's, and saw her condition at a glance. She was dying, not of any definite decease, but of shame and a broken heart. Marriott had murdered my poor girl, as surely as though he had stabbed her to the heart. I tended her to the last, and then on her deathbed I swore that if no court of justice could bring the crime home to him, I would be his executioner. "I went in search of him at once, but failed to find him, though I hunted him all round the world. At last, having reason to believe him dead, I returned to America. Not till the other day, when chance brought - him into my house, did I know that he was alive. Then, as soon as I was sure of him, I fulfilled my vow. Had I the opportunity again, I wouldkill him as I did, without hesitation; and if I am to die for it I shall die without regret for the act. My last hope is that among those who read the story, there may be some who will not condemn me.