Clarke, whose bones were not those found on Thistle Hill, but were lying buried in St. Robert's cave. There the skeleton of Clarke was unearthed, according to Houseman's indication. Furnished with the horse-dealer's information, now valuable indeed, Barker and Moore, two Knaresborough constables, set out for Lynn disguised as Yorkshire cattle-dealers. Arrived at Lynn, the constables made inquiries at the local inn, where they were soon able to satisfy themselves that the man they wanted and the usher at the grammar school were one and the same person. Aram was standing in a corner of the playground when he was apprehended, handcuffed, and, amidst the tears of his pupils, driven off in a chaise to Knaresborough with his two captors. It will be seen from this that he did not walk between the two sternfaced men, whose proceedings are so graphically described in Hood's poem. His arrival at Knaresborough had been eagerly awaited. As he stepped from the chaise at the door of the Bell Inn, the rustic crowd observed with admiration his genteel suit of clothes and the elegant frills hanging from his wrists-a very different figure to the impecunious schoolmaster who had left them fourteen years before. Since then Eugene Aram had been courted and respected by men who were of a position to appreciate the learned and ingenious scholar, who had known nothing of the obscure and nefarious past, who would have been shocked and startled indeed to have seen the elegant frills of the meditative usher trailing over the handcuffs. In the parlour of the inn Aram found the Vicar and a number of local gentlemen whom the singular circumstances of the crime and the personality of the criminal had drawn together. Aram conversed freely and calmly with the assembled company, and assured them of his ability to meet the charges brought against him. In the midst of his conversation his wife, who had been told of her husband's arrival, entered the room with her children. He took no notice of them till he had finished his conversation with the gentry; then, turning to her, said coldly, 'Well, how do you do?' He then asked after one of his sons, an idiot; his wife answered that the boy was worse; he told her that if she had followed his instructions he Iwould have been better. A year passed between Aram's return to Knaresborough and his trial at York in the August of 1759. The interval of time was occupied, presumably, in some attempt to procure such evidence as would convict both Aram and Houseman without having to accept the testimony of either man against the other. Not that Aram would have offered himself as a witness against his accomplice: his firmness and courage—if such a word may be used—are as remarkable as the trembling cowardice of Houseman. Of the latter he spoke with bitter contempt. Young woman,' he said to a girl who served him with his meals in York Castle, if you ever get married, don't take a man that has got a hen's heart, but choose one that has a cock's.' His mind was so composed that even the parting agony of his dear daughter Sally did not prevent him from giving her a receipt for removing freckles. As she stood sobbing at the gates of the Castle he noticed she had become tanned and freckled with the sun. Poor Sally in the midst of her tears admitted the soft impeachment, but said she didn't know how to get rid of them. 'Oh, make a wash with lemon juice, that will clear you,' answered her father. The trial of Eugene Aram took place at York before Mr. Justice Noel on the 13th of August. To the surprise of Aram, Houseman, who had been previously arraigned and acquitted for want of evidence, appeared in the box as a witness for the Crown. It may be partly due to his surprise at this proceeding that in his now famous defence Aram made no effort to reply to the evidence given against him; in all probability the evidence was sufficiently clear to make an effective answer impossible. There is no report of the trial; Aram's speech is the only part preserved to us, and in this he is altogether silent as to any of the witnesses called by the prosecution. Scatcherd says that, though the wisest of men, Aram was too much of a child in a law court to make a defence that would have satisfied a judge and jury. Certainly Aram laboured under the usual disadvantages of prisoners in those days; but it is difficult to believe from his previous career, or the ingeniousness of the defence which he did make, that he was so childlike as to have been unable to offer a refutation of the case against him if it had been in his power to do so. His defence as it stands, admirable in the modesty of its expression and the ingenuity of its arguments, is absolutely unconvincing. It consists entirely of an attempt to show that the bones of Clarke might be the bones of some long-buried hermit, and he cites a number of instances in which such bones have been found in a similar state of preservation, in spite of a much longer interment than fourteen years. He dwells, too, with becoming diffidence on his irreproachable character and reputation, and the improbability of a man of such conduct suddenly, without any previous experience in crime, committing a horrid murder. In this argument Eugene Aram touches the very mystery of his own career. He has offered a solution of this sudden impulse to crime by accusing his wife of infidelity; we have already commented on the dubious character of that explanation. At the last let Eugene Aram speak for himself. Convicted and condemned to death, he attempted suicide in York Castle the night before his execution. Before opening the veins of his arm with a razor he had concealed for the purpose, he wrote: What am I better than my fathers? To die is natural and necessary. Perfectly sensible of this, I fear no more to die than I did to be born. But the manner of it is something which should in my opinion be decent and manly. I think I have regarded both these points. Certainly nobody has a better right to dispose of a man's life than himself; and he, not others, should determine how. As to any indignities offered to my body, or silly reflections on my faith and morals, they are (as they always were) things indifferent to me. I think, though contrary to the common way of thinking; I wrong no man by this, and hope it is not offensive to that eternal Being that formed me and the world; and as by this I injure no man, no man can be reasonably offended. I solicitously recommend myself to that eternal and almighty Being, the God of nature, if I have done amiss. But perhaps I have not, and I hope this thing will never be imputed to me. Though I am now stained by malevolence and suffer by prejudice, I hope to rise fair and unblemished. My life was not polluted, my morals irreproachable, and my opinions orthodox.1 I slept sound till three o'clock, awaked, and then writ these lines: Come, pleasing rest, eternal slumbers fall, Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all; Adieu! fair friends, and all that's good and wise. Are these lines the dignified farewell of a martyred philosopher, or the egotistical exit of a criminal posing as martyr and philosopher? Would not a word or two of greeting and apology to Clarke and Mrs. Aram have been more seemly and polite on such an occasion than six of the worst lines ever penned-even in the eighteenth century-in praise of his own sublime departure from this world? Over Aram's farewell, one can exclaim with Joseph Surface, 'Ah, my dear sir, 'tis this very conscious innocence that is of the greatest prejudice to you.' One would be so grateful for just some little acknowledgment of human weakness from this consciously irreproachable assassin. Was Eugene Aram a well-intentioned man? That would be the most instructive question to resolve. We are inclined to answer it in the negative; but it is difficult to give a decided verdict on such an issue in the presence of merely oral testimony. All we can say with absolute certainty is that he murdered Daniel Clarke and discovered a European affinity in Celtic roots. For the latter achievement he is entitled to rank with scholars as well as murderers; for the former he was hanged at York, half fainting from his attempt at suicide which had been happily, or unhappily, frustrated, and his body hung in chains near Knaresborough. One of his daughters, Betty, described as a 'wild girl,' saw the corpse swinging in its chains on Thistle Hill and gleefully ran to tell her mother that she had seen father hanging up on the hill; the sight seemed to give her satisfaction. Houseman withdrew with his raven from his native village, loathed and dejected, his windows smashed by old pupils of Aram's, and died in his bed at a place called Marton. Mrs. Aram kept a pie and sausage shop in Knaresborough, and picked up her husband's bones as they fell from the gibbet. H. B. IRVING. 1 I should think it was very doubtful whether a prison chaplain would assent to Aram's claim to orthodoxy. There is a suspicious flavour of eighteenth-century deism in his conception of God. However, the God of the Bible and the God of the philosopher are equally odious on the lips of murderers, repentant or unrepentant. CURIOSITIES ABOUT CRUSTACEA THE astounding ignorance of the man! Such were the words of Samuel Wilberforce on hearing that Pope Pius the Ninth had supposed him to be a mere professor, instead of a bishop-simulated indignation meet for a pardonable mistake. Far other vials of wrath should be out-poured on the worse than papal blindness with which the carcinologist is continually affronted. In their astounding ignorance many, who fancy themselves well educated, have never even heard the name, let alone knowing what it means. That editor, therefore, deserves well of his country and his time, who opens his columns to the much-needed and impressive explanation that a carcinologist is a student of crustacea. To have won this single forward step in public education is something of value. But there are still deplorable depths of darkness to be dealt with. In unhappy contrast with 'the boasted enlightenment of the nineteeth century,' there is the painful fact that persons in the upper and middle classes of society frequently confound crustacea with the molluscs which they are pleased to speak of as shell-fish, not so much from the old notion that whatever comes out of the sea must be in a manner fishy, as from the more modern one that whatever is sold by the fishmonger may decently be regarded as fish. People advanced in life and in respectable circumstances will confess, quite unabashed, and as though it were nothing to be ashamed of, to having always thought that there was only one kind of shrimp and only one kind of woodlouse. Could anything be more afflicting? Not seldom they confound in their muddled ideas the crayfish of the river with the crawfish of the ocean, or, on the other hand, suppose that a crawfish is a lobster, or again are miserably deluded into confusing the 'Norway Lobster,' elegant in shape and hue, with the common lobster, just because myriads of the latter come to our markets from Norway. One thing indeed is generally known, and of this piece of knowledge the modern world is excessively proud, as though it were a recent discovery, that the portrait of a live lobster ought not to be coloured red. There is also a vague impression that the marine painter was wrong when he attached the claws of the great eatable crab behind the rest of its legs instead of in front of them. How safely, without fear of fault finding on the part of the public, might he have introduced into his picture a 'Spiny Lobster' wearing claws, though it has none, and a common lobster with only one pair of them, though in fact it has three. It is true that the second and third pairs are small, but they are quite distinct and easy to perceive. Really, if the general reader and ordinary seeker after knowledge would bring his powerful mind to bear on the subject, he would find that there is in the study of crustacea as much variety of interest, as much facile amusement and as much perplexing difficulty, as much opportunity for observation and experiment, as much incitement to hunting and collecting, and exploring the recesses of land and sea, as there is in any other fashionable province of exertion. To be more explicit, it can compete on favourable terms with circle-squaring, butterfly-catching, the ascent of lofty mountains, the search for the North Pole, the tabulation of authentic ghosts, the viewing of nebulæ, the counting of asteroids, and the prospecting of stars so distant that we cannot tell whether they are still in existence. Novel-reading and money-making are omitted from this list of examples, lest the objection should be raised that these are necessaries of life, while the study of crustaceans is only a luxury. It is difficult in brief space to give any adequate idea of the extent of the subject. A few species are familiar on the table. These are agreeable to the eye, because the expectant palate pronounces in their favour. They have absorbed an unfair amount of attention. Hence it is little understood that crustaceans have an importance in the food-supply of the globe far beyond that which belongs to them as gratifying the appetite of mankind. The species of them are to be counted by thousands. Their dwelling-places are extremely varied. Their manners and customs are often not a little remarkable. Their diversity of form is such that in this direction it might well be said, 'The force of Nature could no further go.' First among the proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied out, stands that which says, 'It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.' The proverb speaks as though there were sometimes a direct intention in Nature to puzzle and mystify the student, to put him on his mettle in dealing with the intricacy of the problems. There is the playfulness of a riddle propounded, the seriousness of an education designed. Nowhere are these appearances more obtrusive than in the class of crustacea. Only by slow steps have naturalists come to know its proper boundaries, which still at one or two points are subjects of dispute and civil war. As for the poor unhappy people who are not naturalists, it is often difficult to persuade them that a woodlouse is as much a crustacean as a crab. Little do they think that here also belong shorehoppers and barnacles, as well as hosts of creatures opprobriously misnamed water-fleas and fish-lice. It must in |