I wish to suggest to any of your legal or other well-informed correspondents, who will have the kindness to take a little trouble for the benefit of your general readers, that an instructive and interesting communication might be made by noting down the periods at which the various more revolting punishments under the English law were repealed, or fell into disuse. For instance, when torture, such as the rack, was last applied; when embowelling alive and quartering ceased to be practised; and whose was the last head that fell under the axe's bloody stroke. A word also on the use of the pillory, ducking-stool, stocks, &c. would interest. Any illustrations of the modification of our penal code would throw valuable light on the philosophy and improvement of the national character. And I believe it would appear that the Reformation gradually swept away the black horrors of the torture-room; that the butchery of the headsman's block ceased at the close of the civil contest which settled the line of regal succession; and that hanging, which is the proper death of the cur, is now reserved for those only who place themselves out of the pale of humanity by striking at human life. ALFRED GATTY. Ecclesfield. E. S. S. W. (Vol. ii., p. 6.) will find a case of burning in _Dodsley's Annual Register_, 1769, p. 117.: a Susannah Lott was burned for the murder of her husband at Canterbury, Benjamin Buss, her paramour, being hanged about fifteen minutes before she was burned. T. S. N. * * * * * FOLK LORE. _Death-bed Mystery._--In conversation with an aged widow,--as devout and sensible as she is unlettered,--I yesterday learned a death-bed mystery which appeared new to me, and which (if not more commonly known than I take it to be) you may perhaps think worthy of a place in "NOTES AND QUERIES," to serve as a minor satellite to some more luminous communication, in reply to B. H. at Vol. i., p. 315. My informant's "_religio_" (as she appears to have derived it by tradition from her mother, and as confirmed by her own experience in the case of a father, a {52} husband, several children, and others), is to the effect that a considerable interval _invariably_ elapses between the first semblance of death, and what she considers to be the departure of the soul. About five minutes after the time when death, to all outward appearance, has taken place, "the last breath," as she describes, may be seen to issue with a vapour, or "steam," out of the mouth of the departed. The statement reminds me of Webster's argument, in his _Display of supposed Witchcraft_, chap. xvi., where, writing of the bleeding of corpses in presence of their murderers, he observes: