“Martin Laas, a sailor, was in April convicted of murdering a young woman at Worde, near Sandwich. Throughout the whole of his trial he treated the witnesses very insultingly, and gave three loud cheers before he was removed from the dock. Upon this, the Judge gave strict orders for him to be chained to the floor of his dungeon, where he afterwards confessed the crime. He said that on August 25th, as he was sitting on a roadside bank near the halfway house, between Deal and Sandwich, Mary Bax passed by, upon which he followed her, and in half a mile stopped her and inquired the way to Sheerness. She told him he was a great way from that place; whereupon he said he had no money, and must have some. She had none, she said, for him. He then pushed her into a ditch, and jumped after her, into the mud and water, which reached to the middle of him. Taking the bundle she was carrying, and removing the shoes from her feet, he made off across the marshes, towards Dover. The shoes he immediately threw away, and hid the bundle near where he was taken. “The prisoner, giving this account, did not seem to feel the least concern for the crime, or its consequences, but appeared, on the contrary, very cheerful, saying he had been fated to commit it, and to suffer for it, as he had been told, years before, by an old Spaniard. “He was a native of Bergen, in Norway, twenty-seven years of age, and had served under Lord Rodney, in H.M.S. _Fame_, for upwards of two years. He was, however, extremely penitent when brought to the place of execution, acknowleged the justice of his sentence, and prayed with great fervency.” Deal is all very well in summer, but it is in winter and in spring a desperately cold place. It is as though winter, departing reluctantly with the coming of the vernal equinox, lingered fondly here, loth to go. Thanet is open to the east winds, and every gust that blows out of the North Sea is felt acutely at Westgate and Margate, turning noses and hands red or blue, as the case may be; but at Deal your very vitals seem to be frozen stiff and stark with the natural acerbity of the air and with the cutthroat blasts that come murderously out of the many alleys of this strange old seafaring town. At Deal one talks most naturally of the Goodwin Sands. Stretching in a line about eleven miles long, from Broadstairs to Deal, parallel with the coast-line, and roughly from four to five miles from the shore, these dreaded shoals extend at their greatest breadth some four miles. The dangers they offer to the crowded shipping of the Channel lie chiefly in their being covered at high water.