“Were a man brought to die there now, the windows would be closed, and the inhabitants would keep their houses in sickening horror. A hundred years ago people crowded there to see the last act of a highwayman’s life, and made jokes of it. Swift laughed at him, cruelly advised him to provide a holland shirt and a white cap, crowned with a crimson or black ribbon, for his exit, to mount the cart cheerfully, shaking hands with the hangman, and so farewell; or Gay wrote his most delightful ballads, and then made merry over his hero.” The last man hanged at Tyburn was John Austin on 7th November 1783, for robbery and unlawful wounding, and on the following 9th December, the first public execution outside Newgate took place. The _Morning Chronicle_ of that day, in relating the event, added the remark: “The saving to the State and to individuals from the new method of executing criminals is immense. Many indigent families will feel the good effects of preventing the loss of a day. No longer will thoughtless youth neglect their employment to attend Tyburn executions, where too many have become converts to bad practices.” Indeed, the rascality attending these scenes almost passes belief. A Tyburn execution, especially if a “fashionable” one, at which the better—or at least wealthier—class gathered, was an occasion for the assembling of all the pickpockets, watch-snatchers, and bad characters of the town, who plied their skill busily while attention was directed upon the expiring struggles and groans of the poor wretch swinging from the tree. One Francis Grey, as he stood on the scaffold, actually exhorted the crowd around him to give up their evil ways, for he saw many bad men there, and bad deeds had never brought him happiness. In closing the ghastly story of Tyburn Tree, it is interesting to note that _The Times_ of 9th May 1860 printed a letter from Mr. A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, relating that outside the garden of Arklow House, at the extreme angle of Edgware Road, a pipe was being repaired, and many human bones were dug up, doubtless relics of the bodies buried near the Tyburn gallows. Earlier in the nineteenth century, when digging foundations for houses in Connaught Place, workmen had come on human remains, a whole cartload having been removed. Lady Battersea tells me no trace, whatever, of a burial place was found under their house opposite the Marble Arch when digging the drains about 1880. In the later executions, the scaffold, the site of which had been changed, was a movable erection, consisting of two uprights and a cross beam. It was only put up on the morning of execution across the roadway, opposite the house at the corner of Upper Bryanston Street and the Edgware Road, wherein the gibbet was kept when not in use.