What can be farther from the sordid associations of “Tyburn Lane” than Park Lane of to-day, in all its wealth and luxury? Along here the crowds surged in thousands going to witness the turning off at Tyburn’s “Triple Tree” of many a handsome, dashing gentleman of the road, a darling of the populace. One will find these old names marked in maps of a century ago, but may search a London Directory of to-day in vain for the name of any street, passage, or alley of which Tyburn formed a part. The town has grown over the place, and Tyburnia, as the district used to be called, has been altered out of recognition. Possibly a few of the old elms along the course of the West-bourne may still rock in the winds which blow across Hyde Park. The ditch in one part has been transformed into the Serpentine, elsewhere it has been filled and the ground levelled. The Ty-bourne, if it flows at all, flows underground through the sewers. Tyburn turnpike, where tolls were taken on entering London, disappeared in the early part of the nineteenth century, and its site is marked by the zero milestone of London. The famous hanging-place has nothing left by which it can be recognised. It is a common idea that hanging as a means of punishment is comparatively modern. People have even placed its origin within our own historic times. Instead, it is very old indeed, dating back certainly to the Mosaic Law, which was thus delivered by Moses to the Israelites (Deut. xxi. 22): “And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree; his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him the same day; for he that is hanged is accursed of God; that thou defile not the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.” The earliest record of the punishment being actually carried out is found in the Book of Numbers (xxv.), on the occasion of the Israelites having sacrificed to the gods of the Moabites at Baal-peor, when Moses received and put into effect the Divine command to hang the leaders in the acts of idolatry. Later, when a famine was raging in the land of Israel, David handed over to the Gibeonites seven of the sons of Saul, whom they hanged. Another instance of punishment by hanging is found in the Book of Esther (ix.), when King Ahasuerus condemned the ambitious and unprincipled Haman to be hanged on the gallows he had prepared for the Jew Mordecai; and at the request of Queen Esther the same punishment was meted out to his ten sons. Hanging was regulated by law by Henry I., but the earliest recorded use of the rope in England can be traced to the days of Henry II. This questionable distinction belongs to the town of Malden, which, in the year 1167, “was amerced three marks for having hanged a robber without such view,” that is to say, the approval of the King’s Sergeant.