To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have hitherto appeared visionary and imaginative now take the character of substantial reality. We discover that horrors are not confined to books or to a picturesque past, but are going on all round us; and the discovery is fraught with an uneasy joy. When I recall the illusions of my infancy and the facts which displaced them, I feel that I fall miserably below the ideal of childhood presented in the famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." My "daily travel further from the East" is marked by memories of dreadful deeds, and the "vision splendid" which attends me on my way is a vivid succession of peculiarly startling murders. In the dawn of consciousness these visions have "something of celestial light" about them--they are spiritual, impalpable, ideal. At length the youth perceives them die away, "and melt into the light of common day"--very common day indeed, the day of the Old Bailey and the _Police News_. By a curious chain of coincidences, I was early made acquainted with the history of that unfriendly Friend John Tawell, who murdered his sweetheart with prussic acid, and was the first criminal to be arrested by means of the electric telegraph. Heroic was the defence set up by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who tried to prove that an inordinate love of eating apples, pips and all, accounted for the amount of prussic acid found in the victim's body. Kelly lived to be Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, but the professional nickname of "Apple-pip Kelly" stuck to him to the end. I know the house where Tawell lived; I have sat under the apple-tree of which his victim ate; and I have stood, the centre of a roaring election crowd, on the exact spot outside the Court-house at Aylesbury where he expiated his crime.