Nantwich, Sandbach & Crewe Star — 1888-08-04 ()

ONE HALFPENNY.  Dr. Fox is certainly not onrilimentary to the great unpaid, and if he should eirer be so unfortunate as to be caught in the magisterial meshes, they will give a rouging "View halloo !" at the sight of the Fox in their den. Until then, the phrase, " marvellous inaptitude and phenomenal imbecility" will stick in the craws Jf the wise birds who dispense justices' justice.  ---:o:  The members of the Nantwich Local Board are, however, determined that the diseased meat case shall not rest where the justices' left it, for their clerk was instructed to prepare any further evidence he might need in prosecuting a charge of perjury against William Dodd. The Nantwich authorities are determined to  protect the Dublic against poisonous food.  -----:o:---- At the Chester Assizes, which concluded on Monday, two cases of attempted sweetheart murder have been tried, and in each case the accused has been convicted and sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. In one case there are some circumstances which provoke a degree of pity for the prisoner. He was a Kidsgrove collier, and had courted Mary Goodier fifteen years. It is no wonder that poor Mary was tired of waiting, nor surprising that she thought it time to end the. long courtship. She, however, chose an unfortunate time for intorming Samuel Shaw that their engagement was at an end. Shaw was ill, and had to go to an hospital at Birmingham to be treated for bad eyes. There he seems to have brooded over his long and 'disappointing .courtship, and he wrote to Goodier, who was a barmaid at Church Hulme, that he "had lost all care in this world, and when love and care were gone, revenge wati sweet; and those who had taken her from him should not take her any further into the world." He afterwards went to Church Hulme,shot the barmaid in the side, and fired a pistol into his own mouth. The judge sentenced him to as many years' penal servitude as he had been courting Mary Goodier. Surely this story of love and attempted murder is a pitiable illustration of human weakness, suffering, and life failure.  -_--__:o:____.,  In the other case a man named John Cocker, aged 24, of Macclesfield, had been courting for two years a girl named Smith, who was only 16 years of age when the attempted murder took place in April last. The banns of marriage had been published,--but the girl's parents objected to the match, whereupon John Cocker declared, "If I don't marry you, no one else shall," and afterwards he pushed her into the canal at Bollington, and walked away. Sarah Jane Smith screamed for her life, and another man, hearing the cries, rescued her. The punishment of eight years' penal servitude is even more deserved in this case than the sentence upon Shaw, who had suffered intensely by his own attempt to commit suicide. Love turned to Late, is a fearful passion; -but- the case of Cocker the girl whose life he sought to take had not given him up, and his mean, murderous deed merited a heavier penalty than the court awarded. Even Mary Goodier must feel a lingering regret for that sad ;ending to fifteen years' courtship, but Sarah Jane Smith, thankful for her escape from death, must also be quite AS pleased at her escape from a life long alliance with John Cocker,  C