Packed into three small rooms in the basement of New Scotland Yard, and inaccessible to the general public, is one of the most grisly collections in London, court "exhibits" and relics of almost every crime of importance that has taken place in the last three-quarters of a century.
Our attention was first drawn to a number of plaster death-masks ranged overhead round the walls, states a correspondent of "The Observer"—those of criminals executed by hanging, and all taken for anthropometric reasons, in the days when executions were still carried out in public. Two bunches of labelled ropes with nooses in their ends hang from the ceiling in two corners—ropes by means of which some twenty or thirty malefactors ended their lives.
A light rope-ladder used by a modern at burglar is displayed besides the collapsible wooden ladder used by the notorious Charles Peace, executed at Leeds in 1879 for the murder of Alfred Dyson. Peace, our guide explained, was "a very little man." His ladder, carried in a concertina case, is an ingenious contrivance of connected wooden slats which can be opened vertically and hooked over a projecting cornice. The top edge of each slat provided Peace with the necessary foothold as he pulled himself up, Nearby, in a glass case, are his revolver, tools, and dark lantern, the latter with an improvised wick of a tartan material of which his wife was making a dress at the [time of his arrest. catalogue, and their history many books. But not all. the exhibits have to do with murder and sudden death, Sir Roger Casement's cocked hat, sword, and Foreign Office uniform were found among his effects in London. There is a pincushion embroidered like an old fashioned sampler with texts and mottoes for which human hair has been used instead of silk or thread. It was the work of a woman with over three hundred convictions for drunkenness. The pincushion was always handed over to the chaplain on her release from gaol, and given back to her on her inevit-
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Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.