Delaware State Journal And Statesman

A few days since the citizens of Xenia, Ohio, were horrified by a sickening account of cruelties that had been practiced upon a little girl, formerly an inmate of the public infirmary, who had been taken by a family residing in the north-western part of the county to bring up. The child, Mary White by name, is the daughter of one of the inmates of the infirmary, and is now nearly 11 years of age. Nearly three years since, when she was 8 years old, a man by the name of David Emmick, who lives near Fairfield, applied to the Infirmary for a child to raise, and she was given to him. No tidings of her welfare were received during this time until last Wednesday, when a wagon drove up and a pitiable, wan, and disfigured child was taken out and left with the matron of the institution, with the message that "they couldn't keep her any longer, and had brought her back." Judge of the horror of the mother, who is still an inmate of the infirmary, on recognizing this pitiable object as her child. The child, upon examination, showed unmistakable evidences of a long continued and systematic course of ill usage. Her form, instead of presenting the rounded outlines of childhood, is dwarfed and stunted. Her hands, hardened by incessant labor, look almost like claws. Her limbs are black with bruises, from repeated beatings. Her neck is discolored with the marks of a rope, by which she has been hanged and afterward dragged over the floor. Her ankles are lacerated and swollen by a cord with which she has been tied, and, as it is alleged, hung head downward for punishment. Her story, which is given with apparent truthfulness, reveals the fact that during all these three years she has been fiendishly treated. She has been starved and overworked. As a punishment for real or fancied offences, she has been cruelly beaten, hung by the feet head downward—hung by the neck and almost strangled—and, after being taken down, and while the rope was still around her neck, dragged upon the floor around the room. She was, on one occasion, bound with a rope and suspended in a privy vault until nearly dead. These and other fiendish atrocities her story reveals and her appearance indicates. That such fiends as this man Emmick and his wife should live in an enlightened community, and their practices for so long a time remain unknown, is a source of wonder. Now that they are known, we hope a speedy and unflinching justice awaits them.

—Xenia (O.) Torchlight.