The case we shall first select, not so much for the manner of the murderer’s detection as for the singular plan he struck out to escape suspicion, and the strange circumstances connected with the crime and its punishment altogether, is that of a man named M’Gennis, for the murder of his wife. M’Gennis, when we saw him on his trial, was a peculiarly powerful-looking man, standing upwards of six feet, strongly proportioned, and evidently of great muscular strength. His countenance, however, was by no means good, his face being colourless, his brow heavy, and the whole cast of his features stern and forbidding. From his appearance altogether he struck us at once as one eminently fitted and likely to have played a conspicuous part in the faction fights so common during his youth at our fairs and markets. But though we made several inquiries both then and since, we could not learn that he had ever been prominent in such scenes, or remarkable for a quarrelsome disposition. He was a small farmer, residing at a village nearly in a line between the little town of Claremorris, and the still smaller but more ancient one of Ballyhaunis, near the borders of Mayo. With him lived his mother and wife, a very comely young woman, it is said, to whom he had not been long married at the time of the perpetration of the murder, and with whom he had never had any previous altercation such as to attract the observation or interference of the neighbours. It was on a market evening of Claremorris, in the year 1830, that the mother of M’Gennis, a withered hag, almost doubled with age, and who on our first seeing her strongly reminded us of the witches that used, in description at least, to frighten and fascinate our boyhood, hobbled with great apparent terror into the cabin nearest her own, and alarmed the occupants by stating that she had heard a noise in the potato room, and that she feared her daughter-in-law was doing some harm to herself. Two or three of them accordingly returned speedily with her, and, entering the room, saw the lifeless body of the unfortunate young woman lying on the potatoes in a state of complete nudity. There was no blood or mark of violence on any part of the body, except the face and throat, round the latter of which a slight handkerchief was suffocatingly tied, by which she had evidently been strangled, as both face and neck were blackened and swollen. Who then had perpetrated the deed? was the question whispered by all the neighbours as they came and went. M’Gennis, according to his mother’s account, had not yet returned from the market; the hag herself would not have had strength to accomplish the murder even if bloody-minded enough to attempt it, and it was next to an impossibility that the young woman herself could have committed self-destruction in _that_ manner.