informs me that a letter by Margaret Catchpole, written only a few days before she sailed to Australia, and the lyre bird that she sent to her mistress about a year after her arrival, are the two curiosities of the Museum most eagerly inquired after by strangers. Here is the letter in question:—

How small a matter a sentence of death for horse-stealing was counted in the closing years of the eighteenth century may be gathered from the fact that the contemporary newspaper report of 1797 runs only to five lines, as follows:—

Undoubtedly one of the characteristics of the book that give it so permanent a place in literature is the circumstance that it preserves for us a glimpse of the cruel criminal law of the eighteenth century. Hanging for small offences went on for years after this, until, indeed, public opinion was revolted by the case of the young married woman who in Ludgate Hill lifted a piece of cloth from the counter. She hesitated and then put it down again. But she had been seen, and was arrested, tried, condemned, and hanged, although it was clearly proved that her husband had been seized by a press-gang and that her babe cried for bread. After this time came a reaction against the death penalty for theft. Margaret, then, was more fortunate than that unhappy woman and than the more celebrated Deacon Brodie, who was hanged in Edinburgh, the city which he had adorned as a Councillor, for a house-breaking theft which brought him four pounds or less. She doubtless owed her escape to the powerful influence of the Cobbolds.[8]

Margaret Catchpole is the classic novel of Suffolk. That county of soothing landscape and bracing sea has produced greater books; it has given us more interesting authors than Richard Cobbold. Within its borders were written the many fine poems of George Crabbe, the many attractive letters of Edward Fitz Gerald. The remarkable paraphrase from the Persian known to all the English speaking world as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was composed here. But, although many latter-day novelists have laid their scenes in these pleasant places, made memorable by the art of Constable, not one has secured so fascinating a topic or so world-wide an audience. Margaret Catchpole is one of the few heroines of fiction of whom one loves to remember that she was real flesh and blood.

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