The New Hampshire Gazette

From the Omnium Gatherum.

AFFECTING ANECDOTE.

The legislature of Virginia have lately been engaged in revising the criminal code. A committee of the assembly, in an appropriate report (after alluding to the differences in the systems of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, &c.) introduces the following pathetic narration from the records of the English Tyburn:

"During the late disputes about Falkland's Islands, a workman in London was returning one day to his family with his weekly wages. He was apprehended by a press gang, and carried into the hold of a tender. His landlord and other creditors heard of what they called his elopement. They seized on his furniture, and his wife and children were turned to the door. Within a few days after the mother was delivered of a second in a garret. When weakness permitted her to rise, she left two naked children and wandered into the streets as a common beggar. Instead of obtaining assistance she was reproached as an abandoned vagabond. In despair, she went into a shop and attempted to carry off a small piece of linen. She was seized, tried, and condemned to be hanged. In her defence the woman said that she had lived respectably, till a press gang robbed her of her husband, and in him, all means to support herself and family, and that in attempting to clothe her new born infant, she perhaps did wrong, as she did not at that time know what she did. The parish officers and other witnesses bore testimony to the truth of her averment, but all to no purpose: she was ordered for Tyburn. Though her milk, if she had any, must have been soured in poison, it seems that nobody condescended to seek a nurse for the child. The hangman dragged her sucking infant from her breast, when he strained the cord about her neck."