Altogether Mary Ann, in the twenty years during which she had been moving in Cornwall and about the northeastern counties, had, as it ultimately transpired, done away with twenty-four persons. Nine of these were the fruit of her own loins. One of them was the mother who gave her birth. Retribution fell upon her through her twenty-fourth victim, Charles Edward Cotton, her infant child. His death created suspicion. The child, it was shown, was an obstacle to the marriage which she was already contemplating--her fifth marriage, and, most likely, bigamous at that. The doctor who had attended the child refused a death certificate. In post-mortem examination arsenic was found in the child's body. Cotton was arrested. She was brought to trial in the early part of 1873 at Durham Assizes. As said already, she was found guilty and sentenced to death, the sentence being executed upon her in Durham Gaol in March of that year. Before she died she made the following remarkable statement: "I have been a poisoner, but not intentionally." It is believed that she secured the poison from a vermicide in which arsenic was mixed with soft soap. One finds it hard to believe that she extracted the arsenic from the preparation (as she must have done before administering it, or otherwise it must have been its own emetic) unintentionally. What advantage Mary Ann Cotton derived from her poisonings can have been but small, almost as small as that gained by Helene Jegado. Was it for social advancement that she murdered husbands and children? Was she a 'climber' in that sphere of society in which she moved? One hesitates to think that passion swayed her in being rid of the infant obstacle to the fifth marriage of her contemplation. With her "all o'er-teeming loins," this woman, Hecuba in no other particular, must have been a very sow were this her motive. But I have come almost by accident on the word I need to compare Mary Ann Cotton with Jegado. The Bretonne, creeping about her native province leaving death in her track, with her piety, her hypocrisy, her enjoyment of her own cruelty, is sinister and repellent. But Mary Ann, moving from mate to mate and farrowing from each, then savaging both them and the litter, has a musty sowishness that the Bretonne misses. Both foul, yes. But we needn't, we islanders, do any Jingo business in setting Mary Ann against Helene. VII: -- THE MERRY WIDOWS