The Sun. — 1846-12-11 (London, England)

REPORTED MURDER OF AN OFFICER OF THE BOARD OF WORKS.  The Evening Mail contains the :" We have just heard (on what we consider competent authority) that an overseer of the Board of Works has been most inhumanly murdered in the county of Clare. He is said to have been cut to pieces with reaping hooks."  No insult was offered to the prisoner as he passed along the passage opened for him by the crowd ; but if there were no public demonstration calculated to wound him, there was also an absence of any kind sympathy tending to cheer him. A deep, a stern, a solemn, a religious silence was maintained by the multitude as the malefactor, attended by the two priests, dragged himself to the foot of the guillotine. At that moment the executioner, attended by his two assistants, appeared upon the scaffold. He lowered the axe, tried its edge, and then greased the grooves, in which it worked up and down, with a piece of candle. The gendarmes helped the condemned one up the steps to the platform ; his face was colourless, and upon it could death impress no more hideous expression, nor throw a more ashy pallor than it already wore. His legs almost refused to perform their office ; his hands were clasped together in bitter—bitter agony of mind—but his eyeballs seemed dead and lustreless, although his brain was at that moment the seat of such appalling—such withering—such lightning- blasting thoughts !  Oh ! who may say what agonies were experienced by that young man during the few moments he stood upon the platform of the guillotine, while the executioner's assistants bound him to the fatal plank ? Who shall decide whether that short interval of ineffable horror were not meet expiation for even the dread crime of which he had been guilty ? Oh too dread subject for contemplation, if mortal have exceeded the trust reposed in him, and flown in the face of his Maker by taking away even under the semblance and sanction of human justice, the lives of those who are created in that Maker's image !_  The dread preparations were completed ; the criminal was bound powerless to a plank, which was then lowered to a horizontal position, and shoved onward until the head of the miserable man fitted into a holipw in a block of wood, perpendicularly placed beneath the hatchet. Another block of wood, also with a semicircular hollowing was drawn down above his neck, so that his head was now fixed in a hole resembling those of the stocks. .The priests leant forward to whisper the last consolation of man in the malefactor's ears, and all being ready, the executioner pulled a string which let the fatal axe loose. Down—down the newly• greased grooves it fell, quick as the eye can wink ; and the head was here— and the trunk was there ! And then the crowds began to a disperse, but less rapidly than they had assembled ; and one by one the spectators withdrew their heads from the windows, and the casements themselves were closed, or had their curtains drawn down, and in an hour after the execution not a trace of that supreme act of the law was left—no, not even the blood of the criminal upon the pavement, nor a rafter of the guillotine in the market-place.