The Daily Times. — 1860-08-21 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

GALLAGHER, THE WIFE MURDERER.  THE dismal portals of the tomb present a ghastly aspect, even when revealed to the mind's eye amid the flickering glimpses of that twilight which surrounds the expiring instincts of nature. How unutterably more repellant and hideous seem those grim gates of death, when to mental vision they are unfolded in the full blaze of the noontide of life, while in conscious possession of health, sense, and vitality. Disease may so rack and exhaust the spirit that dissolution promises the only relief from pres'ent torment ; but to be deprived of existence, when the pulse beats high with life and a feeling of all its capabilities and hopes, and that, by a cool, deliberate and leisurely process which makes the approaching catastrophe for a time as visible as it is certain, must produce, in the mind of the guilty convict, untold and incommunicable horrors. To die a victim to the law, ignominiously suspended on a common rope, and to have one's dying convulsions thus made a holiday spectacle of, for the vulgar, is to most men a fate more severe by far than years,—nay, than a whole lifetime of unres'ealed miseries in the hulks or on the bleak and cheerless shores of Western Australia. Yet such is the gloomy fate,—the inevitable doom—of a wretched, ignorant, and debased creature who now lies in our county  gaol, awaiting execution. Who can read the record of the deathbed scene of MARY GALLAGHER without feeling that this crime of wife-murder is one of the most atrocious for which man was ever sentenced to death. Albeit somewhat " unused to the melting mood," we might find some excuse for dropping a tear over so touching a scene. There lay the wounded wife, through whose gaping wounds, inflicted without provocation, life was fast ebbing; and yonder stood he who had done the foul deed. The authorities and officers of justice quietly steal around her dying couch, and whisper their inquiries as to the fatal scene. The moribund object of their care was still sufficiently alive to understand their object and the purport of their questionings. She endeavoured faithfully to narrate the incidents of the murderous onslaught, as far as its suddenness had left her consciousness to know .or to remember it. While thus simply uttering her recollections of the facts, she seemed chiefly anxious lest anything should befal the unhappy man. The longabused and now murdered wife, hovering on the margin of the grave, was still a true woman, and showed all a woman's devotion, regardless of every consideration of self—showing, under circumstances which forbid any idea of insincerity or of designing policy, that spirit of pure submissiveness, and that mercifully forgiving heart, which sublime female human nature until it approaches the perfect—the divine. It must do every one good to realise the picture, and, as it were, hear her earnest words, as before her death she closed her statement to the magistrate with a warm expression of feeling—"l do not wish to do anything to him ; I forgive him with all my heart." These tender words need -no comment. " How angelic she—and he, how much the blacker devil," that could have murdered a wife so faithful and forbearing. She, whose body, bearing so many mortal gashes, now lies mouldering in a pauper's grave, only five short years ago was the winsome, happy, hopeful bride of him who brandished the fatal knife whose strokes deprived her of existence. He who so recently vowed to honour, cherish, and protect that woman, now stands convicted by his country of having foully slaughtered and murdered her, without provocation. The humble bridal chamber stands forth to the imagination in awful contrast to the last scene in which the husband slew the wife and mother. As the wife of a poor man and the mother of his two children, no doubt often struggling hard for the barest means of subsistence, she surely deserved some other recompense from him than that of being barbarously attacked and sent, almost without warning, to her long account. Who has seen aught of the vicissitudes and trials of humble married life without learning that woman is the greater sufferer from the privations and sorrows that poverty and want of employment; from whatever cause, inflict upon the families of the poor ; and who that has read the report of the trial can doubt that MARY GALLAGHER had patiently submitted to much that was exhausting and exasperating in the extreme, without a murmur that was unreasonable or unduly provoking ? Even after she must have felt that she had received her death wounds from him who was bound to protect her,