Anton Chekov - Medicine is my wife and literature is my mistress

Anton Chekhov, in full Anton Pavlovich Chekhov   (born January 29 [January 17, Old Style], 1860, Taganrog, Russia—died July 14/15 [July 1/2], 1904, Badenweiler, Germany), Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He was a literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters. Chekhov’s best plays and short stories lack complex plots and neat solutions. Concentrating on apparent trivialities, they create a special kind of atmosphere, sometimes termed haunting or lyrical. Chekhov described the Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of obtrusive literary devices, and he is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late 19th-century Russian realist school.

Boyhood and youth

Chekhov’s father was a struggling grocer and pious martinet who had been born a serf. He compelled his son to serve in his shop, also conscripting him into a church choir, which he himself conducted. Despite the kindness of his mother, childhood remained a painful memory to Chekhov, although it later proved to be a vivid and absorbing experience that he often invoked in his works.

After briefly attending a local school for Greek boys, Chekhov entered the town gimnaziya (high school), where he remained for 10 years. There he received the best standard education then available—thorough but unimaginative and based on the Greek and Latin classics. During his last three years at school Chekhov lived alone and supported himself by coaching younger boys; his father, having gone bankrupt, had moved with the rest of his family to Moscow to make a fresh start.

In the autumn of 1879 Chekhov joined his family in Moscow, which was to be his main base until 1892. He at once enrolled in the university’s medical faculty, graduating in 1884 as a doctor. By that time he was already the economic mainstay of his family, for his father could obtain only poorly paid employment. As unofficial head of the family Anton showed great reserves of responsibility and energy, cheerfully supporting his mother and the younger children through his freelance earnings as a journalist and writer of comic sketches—work that he combined with arduous medical studies and a busy social life.

Chekhov began his writing career as the author of anecdotes for humorous journals, signing his early work pseudonymously. By 1888 he had become widely popular with a “lowbrow” public and had already produced a body of work more voluminous than all his later writings put together. And he had, in the process, turned the short comic sketch of about 1,000 words into a minor art form. He had also experimented in serious writing, providing studies of human misery and despair strangely at variance with the frenzied facetiousness of his comic work. Gradually that serious vein absorbed him and soon predominated over the comic.

Literary maturity

Chekhov’s literary progress during his early 20s may be charted by the first appearance of his work in a sequence of publications in the capital, St. Petersburg, each successive vehicle being more serious and respected than its predecessor. Finally, in 1888, Chekhov published his first work in a leading literary review, Severny vestnik (“Northern Herald”). With the work in question—a long story entitled “Steppe”—he at last turned his back on comic fiction. “Steppe,” an autobiographical work describing a journey in the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a child, is the first among more than 50 stories published in a variety of journals and selections between 1888 and his death in 1904. It is on that corpus of later stories, but also on his mature dramas of the same period, that Chekhov’s main reputation rests.

Although the year 1888 first saw Chekhov concentrating almost exclusively on short stories that were serious in conception, humour—now underlying—nearly always remained an important ingredient. There was also a concentration on quality at the expense of quantity, the number of publications dropping suddenly from over a hundred items a year in the peak years 1886 and 1887 to only 10 short stories in 1888. Besides “Steppe,” Chekhov also wrote several profoundly tragic studies at that time, the most notable of which was “A Dreary Story” (1889), a penetrating study into the mind of an elderly and dying professor of medicine. The ingenuity and insight displayed in that tour de force was especially remarkable, coming from an author so young. The play Ivanov (1887–89) culminates in the suicide of a young man nearer to the author’s own age. Together with “A Dreary Story,” that belongs to a group among Chekhov’s works that have been called clinical studies. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically ill in a spirit that reminds one that the author was himself a qualified—and remained a sporadically practicing—doctor.

By the late 1880s many critics had begun to reprimand Chekhov, now that he was sufficiently well known to attract their attention, for holding no firm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with a sense of direction. Such expectations irked Chekhov, who was unpolitical and philosophically uncommitted. In early 1890 he suddenly sought relief from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man sociological expedition to a remote island, Sakhalin. Situated nearly 6,000 miles (9,650 km) east of Moscow, on the other side of Siberia, it was notorious as an imperial Russian penal settlement. Chekhov’s journey there was a long and hazardous ordeal by carriage and riverboat. After arriving unscathed, studying local conditions, and conducting a census of the islanders, he returned to publish his findings as a research thesis, which attained an honoured place in the annals of Russian penology: The Island of Sakhalin (1893–94).

Chekhov paid his first visit to western Europe in the company of A.S. Suvorin, a wealthy newspaper proprietor and the publisher of much of Chekhov’s own work. Their long and close friendship caused Chekhov some unpopularity, owing to the politically reactionary character of Suvorin’s newspaper, Novoye vremya (“New Time”). Eventually Chekhov broke with Suvorin over the attitude taken by the paper toward the notorious Alfred Dreyfus affair in France, with Chekhov championing Dreyfus.

During the years just before and after his Sakhalin expedition, Chekhov had continued his experiments as a dramatist. His Wood Demon (1888–89) is a long-winded and ineptly facetious four-act play, which somehow, by a miracle of art, became converted—largely by cutting—into Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya), one of his greatest stage masterpieces. The conversion—to a superb study of aimlessness in a rural manor house—took place some time between 1890 and 1896; the play was published in 1897. Other dramatic efforts of the period include several of the uproarious one-act farces known as vaudevilles: Medved (The Bear), Predlozheniye (The Proposal), Svadba (The Wedding), Yubiley (The Anniversary), and others.

Melikhovo period: 1892–98

After helping, both as doctor and as medical administrator, to relieve the disastrous famine of 1891–92 in Russia, Chekhov bought a country estate in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Moscow. That was his main residence for about six years, providing a home for his aging parents, as also for his sister Mariya, who acted as his housekeeper and remained unmarried in order to look after her brother. The Melikhovo period was the most creatively effective of Chekhov’s life so far as short stories were concerned, for it was during those six years that he wrote “The Butterfly,” “Neighbours” (1892), “An Anonymous Story” (1893), “The Black Monk” (1894), “Murder,” and “Ariadne” (1895), among many other masterpieces. Village life now became a leading theme in his work, most notably in “Peasants” (1897). Undistinguished by plot, the short sequence of brilliant sketches created more stir in Russia than any other single work of Chekhov’s, partly owing to his rejection of the convention whereby writers commonly presented the Russian peasantry in sentimentalized and debrutalized form.

Continuing to provide many portraits of the intelligentsia, Chekhov also described the commercial and factory-owning world in such stories as “A Woman’s Kingdom,” (1894) and “Three Years” (1895). As has often been recognized, Chekhov’s work provides a panoramic study of the Russia of his day, and one so accurate that it could even be used as a sociological source.

In some of his stories of the Melikhovo period, Chekhov attacked by implication the teachings of Leo Tolstoy, the well-known novelist and thinker, and Chekhov’s revered elder contemporary. Himself once (in the late 1880s) a tentative disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life, and also of nonresistance to evil as advocated by Tolstoy, Chekhov had now rejected those doctrines. He illustrated his new view in one particularly outstanding story: “Ward Number Six” (1892). Here an elderly doctor shows himself nonresistant to evil by refraining from remedying the appalling conditions in the mental ward of which he has charge—only to be incarcerated as a patient himself through the intrigues of a subordinate. “In My Life ”(1896) the young hero, son of a provincial architect, insists on defying middle-class convention by becoming a house painter, a cultivation of the Tolstoyan simple life that Chekhov portrays as misconceived. In a later trio of linked stories, “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love” (1898), Chekhov further develops the same theme, showing various figures who similarly fail to realize their full potentialities. As those pleas in favour of personal freedom illustrate, Chekhov’s stories frequently contain some kind of submerged moral, though he never worked out a comprehensive ethical or philosophical doctrine.

Chayka (The Seagull) is Chekhov’s only dramatic work dating with certainty from the Melikhovo period. First performed in St. Petersburg on October 17, 1896 (Old Style), the four-act drama, misnamed a comedy, was badly received; indeed, it was almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act, having suffered one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and vowing never to write for the stage again. Two years later, however, the play was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre, enjoying considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist. The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov’s friends.

Yalta period: 1899–1904

In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis, symptoms of which had become apparent considerably earlier. Now forced to acknowledge himself a semi-invalid, Chekhov sold his Melikhovo estate and built a villa in Yalta, the Crimean coastal resort. From then on he spent most of his winters there or on the French Riviera, cut off from the intellectual life of Moscow and St. Petersburg. That was all the more galling since his plays were beginning to attract serious attention. Moreover, Chekhov had become attracted by a young actress, Olga Knipper, who was appearing in his plays, and whom he eventually married in 1901; the marriage probably marked the only profound love affair of his life. But since Knipper continued to pursue her acting career, husband and wife lived apart during most of the winter months, and there were no children of the marriage.

Never a successful financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works, excluding plays, to the publisher A.F. Marx for 75,000 rubles, an unduly low sum. In 1899–1901 Marx issued the first comprehensive edition of Chekhov’s works, in 10 volumes, after the author had himself rejected many of his juvenilia. Even so, that publication, reprinted in 1903 with supplementary material, was unsatisfactory in many ways.

Chekhov’s Yalta period saw a decline in the production of short stories and a greater emphasis on drama. His two last plays—Tri sestry (Three Sisters), first performed in 1901, and Vishnyovy sad (The Cherry Orchard), first performed in 1904—were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre. But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre’s two founders, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstanin Stanislavsky, he remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and performances of his plays as he was able to witness. Repeatedly insisting that his mature drama was comedy rather than tragedy, Chekhov grew distressed when producers insisted on a heavy treatment, overemphasizing the—admittedly frequent—occasions on which the characters inveigh against the boredom and futility of their lives. Despite Stanislavsky’s reputation as an innovator who had brought a natural, nondeclamatory style to the hitherto overhistrionic Russian stage, his productions were never natural and nondeclamatory enough for Chekhov, who wished his work to be acted with the lightest possible touch. And though Chekhov’s mature plays have since become established in repertoires all over the world, it remains doubtful whether his craving for the light touch has been satisfied except on the rarest of occasions. Yet oversolemnity can be the ruin of Three Sisters, for example—the play in which Chekhov so sensitively portrays the longings of a trio of provincial young women. Insisting that his The Cherry Orchard was “a comedy, in places even a farce,” Chekhov offered in that last play a poignant picture of the Russian landowning class in decline, portraying characters who remain comic despite their very poignancy. The play was first performed in Moscow on January 17, 1904 (Old Style), and less than six months later Chekhov died of tuberculosis.

Though already celebrated by the Russian literary public at the time of his death, Chekhov did not become internationally famous until the years after World War I, by which time the translations of Constance Garnett (into English) and of others had helped to publicize his work. Yet his elusive, superficially guileless style of writing—in which what is left unsaid often seems so much more important than what is said—has defied effective analysis by literary critics, as well as effective imitation by creative writers.

It was not until 40 years after his death, with the issue of the 20-volume Polnoye sobraniye sochineny i pisem A.P. Chekhova (“Complete Works and Letters of A.P. Chekhov”) of 1944–51, that Chekhov was at last presented in Russian on a level of scholarship worthy—though with certain reservations—of his achievement. Eight volumes of that edition contain his correspondence, amounting to several thousand letters. Outstandingly witty and lively, they belie the legend—commonly believed during the author’s lifetime—that he was hopelessly pessimistic in outlook. As samples of the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov’s letters have been rated second only to Aleksandr Pushkin’s by the literary historian D.S. Mirsky. Although Chekhov is chiefly known for his plays, his stories—and particularly those that were written after 1888—represent, according to some critics, an even more significant and creative literary achievement.

Laurence Waddell - Professor of Pathology of Calcutta Medical College who was Indiana Jones in real life!

Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell, CB, CIE, F.L.S., L.L.D, M.Ch., I.M.S. RAI, F.R.A.S (1854–1938) was a British explorer, Professor of Tibetan, Professor of Chemistry and Pathology, British army surgeon, collector in Tibet, and amateur archaeologist. Waddell also studied Sumerian and Sanskrit; he made various translations of seals and other inscriptions. His reputation as a Assyriologist gained little to no academic recognition and his books on the history of civilization have caused controversy. Some of his book publications however were popular with the public, and he is regarded by some today to have been a real-life precursor of the fictitious character Indiana Jones.

Waddell traveled extensively in India throughout the 1890s (including Sikkim and areas on the borders of Nepal and Tibet) and wrote about the Tibetan Buddhist religious practices he observed there. Stationed with the British army in Darjeeling, Waddell learned the Tibetan language and even visited Tibet several times secretly, in disguise. He was the cultural consultant on the 1903-1904 British invasion of Tibet led by Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, and was considered alongside Sir Charles Bell as one of the foremost authorities on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Waddell studied archaeology and ethnology in-between his military assignments across India and Tibet, and his exploits in the Himalayas were published in his highly successful book Among the Himalayas (1899). Various archaeological excavations were also carried out and supervised by Waddell across India, including Pataliputra, of which he did not receive recognition of discovery until long after his death, in 1982, by the government of Bengal. His discoveries at Pataliputra were published in an official report in 1892.

During the 1890s Waddell specialised in Buddhist antiquities and became a collector, between 1895-97 he published "Reports on collections of Indo-Scythian Buddhist Sculptures from the Swat Valley", in 1893 he also read a paper to the International Congress of Orientalists: "On some newly found Indo-Grecian Buddhistic Sculptures from the Swat Valley".In 1895 Waddell published his book Buddhism of Tibet or Lamaism, which was one of the first works published in the west on Buddhism. As a collector, Waddell had come across many Tibetan manuscripts and maps, but was disappointed to not find a single reference to a lost ancient civilization, which he had hoped to discover.

Waddell continued his military service with the Indian Medical Service. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901), including the Relief of Peking in August 1900, for which he was mentioned in despatches, received the China War Medal (1900) with clasp, and was in 1901 appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE).By late 1901 he had moved to North-West Frontier Province and was present during the Mahsud-Waziri Blockade, 1901–02. He was in Malakand in 1902 and took part in the PMO Tibet Mission to Lhasa 1903–04, for which he was again mentioned in despatches, received a medal with clasp and was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Waddell then returned to England where he briefly became Professor of Tibetan at the University College of London (1906–1908).

In 1908, Waddell began to learn Sumerian.Thus in his later career he turned to studying the ancient near east, especially Sumeria and dedicated his time to deciphering or translating ancient cuneiform tablets or seals, most notably including the Scheil dynastic tablet. In 1911, Waddell published two entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica. By 1917, Waddell was fully retired and first started exclusively writing on Aryans, beginning in an article published in the Asiatic Review entitled "Aryan Origin of the World's Civilization".From the 1920s Waddell published several works which attempted to prove an Aryan(i.e., Indo-European) origin of the alphabet and the appearance of Indo-European myth figures in ancient Near Eastern mythologies (e.g., Hittite, Sumerian, Babylonian). The foundation of his argument is what he saw as a persistence of cult practices, religious symbols, mythological stories and figures, and god and hero names throughout Western and Near Eastern civilizations, but also based his arguments on his deciphered Sumerian and Indus-Valley seals, and other archaeological findings.

Waddell died in 1938. That same year, he had completed writing Trojan Origin of World Civilization. The book was never published.

William Minor - A surgeon, a murderer and one of the greatest contributors to Oxford English Dictionary

William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minors (June 1834 – March 26, 1920) was an American army surgeon who, later, was one of the largest contributors of quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary. He was held in a lunatic asylum at the time.

Early life

Minor was born on the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the son of Congregationalist Church missionaries from New England. He had numerous half-siblings, among them Thomas T. Minor, mayor of Seattle, Washington in the late 1880s.

At 14 he was sent to the United States, finishing his medical education in 1863 at Yale.

Military career

He was accepted by the Union Army as a surgeon and served at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, which was notable for the terrible casualties suffered. Minor was also given the task of punishing a Northern soldier by branding him on the face with a D for "deserter". This man was an Irish immigrant, and his nationality later played a role in Minor's dementia delusions.

Move to England

In 1871 he went to the UK settling in the slum of Lambeth, in London where once again he took up a dissolute life. Haunted by his paranoia, he fatally shot a man named George Merrett, who Minor believed had broken into his room, on February 17, 1872. Merrett had been on his way to work to support his family of six children, himself, and his pregnant wife, Eliza.

 After a pre-trial period spent in London's Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity and incarcerated in the asylum at Broadmoor in the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire. As he had his army pension and was not judged dangerous, he was given rather comfortable quarters and was able to buy and read books.

Contributor to OED

It was probably through his correspondence with the London booksellers that he heard of the call for volunteers from what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). He devoted most of the remainder of his life to that work.

He became one of the most effective volunteers, reading through his personal library and compiling quotations that illustrated the way particular words were used. He was visited quite often by the widow of the man he had killed, and she provided him with further books. The compilers of the dictionary published lists of words for which they wanted examples of usage. Chester provided these, with increasing ease as his lists grew. It was many years before the OED's editor, Dr. James Murray, learned Minor's background history, and visited him.

Minor's condition deteriorated and in 1902 he cut off his own penis. His health failed and he was permitted to return to the United States and St. Elizabeths Hospital; he was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. He died in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut

In popular culture

The book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (published in America as The Professor and the Madman) by Simon Winchester, was published in 1998 and chronicles both Minor's later life and his contributions to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Dr William Chester Minor & The O.E.D.

William Chester Minor was born in Ceylon, in June 1834 to New England Congregationalist missionaries. Minor was a clever sensitive lad who painted, played the flute, and spoke several languages but kept having "lascivious thoughts" about the local girls so he was sent 'back' to America when he was 14 to live with an Uncle. He went on to study medicine at Yale and became a surgeon in the Union Army in 1863.

In May 1864 he was at the Battle of the Wilderness (notable for the horrible casualties suffered) and it is thought that the exposure to the full horrors of war including the burning alive of hundreds of soldiers, horrific casualties and mutilations triggered his mental illness. As part of his duties he was forced to brand the letter D on the face of an Irish deserter, a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, and this incident caused him a great deal of mental torment. It is thought to be the basis of his paranoid delusions about the Irish that were a major feature of his later madness.

At the end of the American Civil War Minor saw duty in New York City but he was strongly drawn to the red light area of the city and spent increasing amounts of time and money on prostitutes. By 1867, his behavior had come bizarre and the Army transferred him to a remote post. By 1868 Minor showed growing signs of mental instability, and placed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the U.S. Government Hospital for the Insane. After 18 months he was allowed to resign his commission on the grounds of "incapacitated by causes arising in the line of duty" and started to receive an Army pension.

He was discharged from the hospital in 1871 and came to London as part of a vacation. Here he resumed going with prostitutes and at the same time his paranoia returned with a vengeance. He became obsessed with the idea that the Irish were going to punish him for the branding he carried out during the war. He took to carrying a loaded gun for his own protection.

Early on the 17th February 1872 after returning home late at night he woke up believing that someone was trying to get into his room. He chased after the intruder and shot at a man in the street. George Merritt, a 34 year old stoker at the Lion Brewery, was working an early shift starting at 2am and was walking down Belvedere Road when Minor fired four shots two of which entered his neck. Merritt was declared dead on arrival at St Thomas' hospital.

On the afternoon of April 6, 1872 Dr. William Chester Minor was judged not guilty on grounds of insanity, and was detained "until Her Majesty's Pleasure be known" as a "certified criminal lunatic" at the Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire. Minor was allocated two rooms in the 'swells block' at Broadmoor and was allowed books and painting materials.

Merritt's wife Eliza was left with seven children ranging from 18 years to 12 months to bring up with another on the way. Times were very hard for her and her children but wealthy Minor helped out financially and Eliza even asked to visit Minor in Broadmoor. This highly unusual request was granted and following an experimental visit she started visiting him monthly and even undertook to collect books from various London bookshops for him.

These visits did not last very long as Eliza took to drink but seemed to have greatly helped Minor as it gave him a new occupation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) editor Dr James Murray had an eight page flyer (a letter) inserted into several new books appealing for new readers to find words and quotations for the dictionary. One of these flyers found its way to Dr Minor in Broadmoor, perhaps in one of the books that Eliza brought him. He began reading and collecting books and turned one of his rooms into his library. This he put to good use, as he became a principal contributor of sixteenth and seventeenth century quotations to the first edition of the OED for over thirty years. Minor always signed his letters in the same way: Dr W.C. Minor, Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire and initially the OED editor, Dr James Murray, was unaware that Minor was insane but after many years he started regular visits to Minor in Broadmoor.

By 1902 Minor's mental health had deteriorated and he cut off his penis in an act of self-mutilation, which he thought would stop his lascivious thoughts. In 1910 following strong representations from Dr Murray, the US Consulate and others, the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, signed the necessary papers to allow Minor to return to the mental hospital in the USA.

He died of complications arising from pneumonia on the 26th March 1920 in an old peoples home in New Haven, Connecticut, having been discharged from hospital shortly and is buried at Evergreen Cemetery New Haven. The last psychiatric diagnosis on Minor was that he suffering from dementia praecox or schizophrenia.

Frightful Murder in Lambeth

South London Chronicle

Saturday 24th February 1872

A dreadful tragedy was enacted in Belvedere-road, near Hungerford-bridge on Saturday morning last, whereby a respectable man was shot dead in mistake for another man.

The murderer is William Chester Minor, aged 37, described as an American physician, residing at 41, Tenison-street, York-road, Lambeth. He was charged at Southwark Police-court in the afternoon, when the main evidence was given by Police-constable 236L, who said, that a little after two o'clock on Saturday morning he was on duty in Belvedere-road, when he heard a report of fire-arms. He proceeded in that direction and saw the prisoner coming on the opposite side of the road. He went over to him and asked him who it was that had fired. He said he had, and, asking him who he fired at, he said, "A man. I should not be such a coward as to shoot a woman." Witness seized him and took the revolver produced from his right hand; it was quite warm. He then took him to the station-house, and on the way met another constable, whom he directed to Tenison street, where he found the deceased lying near the wall of the Lion Brewery Stores, bleeding from wounds in the throat. Another constable came up, and they took the body to St. Thomas's Hospital, when he was found to be dead.

The examination at the police-court was continued on Monday when Mr. De Tracey Goued, of the American Bar, and Mr. John Nunn, Vice-consul of the United States, were present; but upon being asked, the prisoner said he had no wish for their services at present. The landlady of the house in which he lodged was called, and spoke as to his general conduct since he took the apartments on the Wednesday after Christmas. She heard him come home about one o'clock on Saturday morning and go to his room, and about a quarter to two heard him go out; she had not heard him go out of a night before. His room was generally unlocked, except when he was at home; never saw any weapon about the room. Ellen Henderson, living at 19, Tenison-street, stated that about two o'clock on Saturday morning she heard four shots fired in rapid succession; one, two-one, two. Saw a constable running down the street, and directed him to the spot whence the sound of the shots came. The most touching point was when Eliza Merritt, the wife of the deceased man, was giving her evidence. On being sworn she said - I live at No.24, Cornwall-cottages, Cornwall-road. My husband had worked for thr Lion Brewery about eight years. He was 34 years of age. On Saturday morning a little before two o'clock he was roused up as usual to go to his work, and he immediately got up and dressed himself. He was in his usual health. He struck a light when he went out and said "good bye," as usual. For the last three weeks he had gone out at two in the morning. I heard nothing more of him until half-past seven, when I was told he was shot. Between two and three in the afternoon I went to see him at the hospital. I have seven children. The eldest is 18 and the youngest 12 months old, and I expect to be confined with another very shortly. My husband had 24s. a week. Our large family kept us very poor so I am now in deep distress.

Sergeant Steggles, Acting-Inspector at Tower-street Police-station, recalled, and said that after his examination on Saturday he went to the prisoner's lodgings and found two large portmanteaus. In them he found seven or eight American coins, five bank notes of 20 livres each, a box containing bulleted cartridges (Ely's make), and five others were handed to him by Mrs. Fisher, who took them from a coat pocket in the room. He found a United States surgeon's diploma, appointing him assistant-surgeon to the army, dated 1866, and a captain's commission, dated 1867. He also found a letter of introduction, signed by J.W. Johnson, addressed to Professor Rood, Sheffield Scientific School, Yale College, Newhaven, Connecticut. He found in the room several water-colours in various stages of completion. After the prisoner was removed from the dock, Mr. Nunn, the Vice-consul, returned into court, and said he had had some conversations with the prisoner, who told him the gold watch and chain were heirlooms in his family, and wished them to be given up to him. Mr Partridge desired the inspector to deliver them up to Mr. Nunn.

The inquest on the body was held on Tuesday, when, after hearing the evidence substantially the same as that given before the police magistrate, with the addition of that by Mr. Williams, one of the hospital house surgeons, who said that either of the two wounds to the neck, produced by bullets, was sufficient to account for death, the jury returned a verdict of Wilful Murder against the prisoner, and the coroner made out his warrant accordingly.

Subscriptions have been set on foot on behalf of the family of the murdered man, and while the Rev. H.W. Bateman, vicar of St. John's, Waterloo-road, states that general subscriptions will be received by him at 158, Stamford-street, or by the secretary to the Lion Brewery Company, Belvedere-road. Mr. Nunn makes as appeal to Americans in London on behalf of the family.

At the inquest the 24s. allowed to the jury were at once handed over to the family.