The Kenilworth Advertiser. — 1876-07-29 (Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England)

CRICEET.—KENILWORTH C C .C. P. WRITNASH .O. the electric fluid struck the north-east wing of —A match was layed at Kenilworth on Saturday the Workhouse at Chilvers Coton, splitting some I between Kenilworth C. C. and Whitnash C.C. The of the woodwork of a bedstead in one of the following is the score :-- upper apartments. A portion of the boarded . floor in a room occupied by a number of female -Trifled, - -valls and '  eliciting a single fact on which to found a reasonable suspicion. Never was the life of any household as thoroughly exposed to the public gaze, and never were the whole of the occurrences and surroundings of a death-bed more minutely chronicled. There have been published many accounts of the death-bed scenes of eminent men, but none so circumstantial and detailed as in the present case. EverYpody who saw Mr. BRAVO from the time he was seized with illness until his death has been called before the Coroner, yet from none of these has any clue been elicited to explain the mystery. The medical witnesses can tell us the deceased died from the effects of an irritant poison, ! and that that poison was antimony in the form of tartar emetic ; but beyond this nothing substantial seems to have been elicited up to the day when we may be allowed to say that the dark-lantern of justice was turned upon a fresh corner, with what result, if any, remains to be seen. But, leaving this phase of the investigation for the present out of the question, we will confine our remarks to that death-bed scene at Balham Priory, so puzzling and utterly confusing in its circumstances. That a number of medical men called in to a suffering man should find him labouring under the effects of irritant poison is not at all an unprecedented event, and it seems strange in these days of advanced medical science that some of the first physicians of the day could do so I little to save a life which had yet many hours to run. They were there long before the last dread agony, but yet they were powerless. They had, it is ; true, aid by the smell, from which to take the suggestion of an antidote, and it was in vain to adjure their patient to help them by confessing what he had taken. " Nothing but laudnum, for the neuralgia," declared the dying man; and when pressed he swore to this on his dying bed, conscious that his life was fast ebbing away from him. He ' was not a pious man, as we gather from the evidence, but he was eminently honorable, truthful, and open in his character. He was not deceitful or reticent. Why should he then deceive or obstinately I hold his tongue at this last solemn hour? Not for want of power to speak, since it would have been less trouble to confess than to deny, for he would not have been called upon to repeat his statement several times in the former case, as he was in the latter. Would this honorable and truthful man, after being warned that his silence might cast suspicion upon others, have gone down to his grave with the secret locked within his breast that it was he who had administered the deadly drug to take away his own life? This man, too, who bad at least enough of religious feeling in his awful position to call upon them around him to join in saying the Lord's prayer. But when we turn to the alternative, that Mr. BRAVO was maliciously poisoned, we are met by the strange phenomenon of the absence of that astonishment, excitement, or even indignation which we might reasonably expect to find in such a case. He seemed not even to have asked the doctors what poison they thought he was suffering from, or to have hazarded a suggestion as to the source from which the poison came, but to have taken all as a matter of course, and to have accepted his fate as if it had been quite as natural as it was inevitable. This might be put down to some strange lethargy of the brain, caused perhaps by the laudanum, only I that we know that Mr. Bravo was in some things I quite rational during the long hours that he lay dying—that, for instance,le could detect and refuse sparkling burgundy when offered him for champagne. So far as'regarded the death-bed scene and -its surroundings—which formed the sole subject of inquiry at the former inquest,and up to the adjournment on Thursday at the present one—the balance of murder or suicide seemed evenly balanced, and we cannot blame the former jury for giving an open verdict without further evidence before them, unsatisfactory as these open verdicts must always be. But there appears to be, however, evidence forthcoming before undreamt of, and the public will watch the development of the inquiry with quickened and vigorous interest, hoping the perpetrators of this I murder, if it be one, may be eventually run to earth.  COVENTRY —_.