The Alton murderer certainly did no credit to his art. His crime was conceived without ingenuity, and executed in the coarsest manner; the only remarkable features in it being its simplicity and atrocity. On a fine afternoon a clerk in a solicitor's office takes a walk outside the town; he sees some children playing in a field by the roadside; one of these, a lively little girl, between eight and nine years of age, he persuades to go with him into an adjoining hop-garden, and the others he gets rid of by giving them a few halfpennies to go home. In a little while he is met walking home alone, and he returns to his office, where he makes an entry in his diary. But what has become of the little girl? Noone has seen her since she was taken from her playfellows into the hop-field. Her parents become alarmed; they arouse their neighbours, and an anxious search is made for the missing child. It is ascertained that she was last seen on her way to the hop-field, and when the searchers hurriedly proceed there, they find the dismembered fragments of her body scattered here and there. A foot is in one place, a hand in another, the heart and the eyes are picked up after a long search; and some parts of the body cannot be found at all. The poor child had clearly been murdered, and her body cut into pieces; but what she underwent before she was butchered may be suspected but cannot be discovered, because the “vagina was missing.” Suspicion fell directly upon the prisoner, and he was arrested. In his desk was found a diary, and in the diary the following entry just made: “Killed a little girl: it was fine and hot.” Such are the main facts, briefly told, of the murder; it is not surprising that they excited horror and disgust in the public mind, and that the prisoner was denounced as a brutal and unnatural scoundrel, for whom, if he were found guilty, hanging was too good.