A REMARKABLE STORY.

Evening Star, Issue 6762, 29 November 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

A REMARKABLE STORY.

The ' Cornishman' of October 1 publishes a narrative of a murder alleged to have been committed in the locality, the narrator professing to have remained silent, under a fearful oath imposed on him at the timo of the committal of the deed, some fifty years since. The writer, who signs himself "G.H.0.," and from Penzance, declares himself willing to indicate the Bpot where the body of the murdered man was buried. Shortly, the story is as follows:—The writer, then a junior in a firm in London, of which be is now the head, came to Penzance in September, 1834, to arrange terms among local tin smelters. He left Penzance one evening to visit a friend in St. Just, which is Borne six miles from Penzance. On the way there, in a lonely part of the. road, he met two men, when he heard one say "That's him," whilst .the other asserted "No, it is not." They again .faced each other, when the two men said they had taken him for another person. Almost immediately a man approached from the direction of St. Just, and the Writer called his attentiol to the suspicious character of the two men. The man,,who Baid he was a mine agent, laughed at his fears and went on his way. He had only proceeded about a couple of hundred yards when he was seized with nervous tremors. His legs. refused to support him, and he fell in the middle of the road, but thought it better not to stay there, and so proceeded on hands and knees across the dusty road, scrambled up a smalt bank, and found himself on a common, which appeared to be many acres in extent." He dragged himself to a heather-covered strip between two clumps of furze, and threw himself at length and closed his eyes. ' After', a little; time he looked' up, and the moonlight revealed to him a newly-made mound. Hearing two shots fired he crouched and waited, and he saw the men just after coming with the body. To quote his letter, "once more a thrill of horror ran through me." On they | came towards the newly-made grave, almost touching my feet as they moved past. Then they turned to the right, and threw the body into the pit with a thud, -*vhich made every fibre in my body vibrate. The corpse in the grave, the two men began to fill it up. Doing that disclosed me. They had not lowered the mound many inches when one of them discovered me. They pounced upon me and demanded what I was doing there, I explained, but all to no purpose. "The same pit will do for him." "Yes, shoot him." "No, cut Wb throat." "Stop, I'll load my pistol again; don't leave any marks of blood about." "Push him in the pit first, and cut his. throat afterwards." These were the horrible threats, accompanied by frightful imprecations, which greeted me, Said one of the men to me again: "We have decided to bury you alive; slip off your clothes; it's hardly worth while burying that good suit of yours; it will do for one of us." I pleaded my youth, my accidental and unpremeditated presence, my newly-made wife, and only child, and this at last seemed to tonch the hearts of the brutes. "Well," said one, "we will spare your life on condition that you swear, as you hope for Heaven and the salvation of your wife, child, and friends. You shall swear it, too, on the point of this knife and the muzzle of this pistol that what you havo seen this night you will never speak of or divulge to any human being for a space of fifty years from this day, when we shall all be as this," at the same timo kicking into the grave a clod of light-colored clayey Boil. I did swear most solemnly. I bought my life on that lonely heath of West Penwith. I have kept my promise. It's a little over fifty years ago. I was then twenty-six years of age, so you see I am an old man now. These men were middleaged, from forty-five, to fifty, at that time. Of his re-visit to the spot, he writes: "Ab I approached the fatal spot the road seemed entirely unaltered. I solemnly believe that I crept through the very gap in the low hedge of earth which still imperfectly protects the croft; that I stood between the self-same clusters of furzs which formed my bed—very nearly my bed of death—and peephole, as the hid the result of their accursed crime, and tnat I knelt on the undisturbed grave where their victim's bones are now mere dust. After half a-contury I knelt again, not to implore mercy of man, as I did then, but of God, lest unwittingly I have sinned in keeping an extorted pledge, and to save myself from harm have reluctantly shielded heinous criminals."