A very strange murder is reported from Liverpool. Mr. Christian
Flueck, a German proprietor of a boarding-school there, had employed a Mr. Howchin as assistant. Howchin for some reason left him, and applied to a Mr. Calder for a tutor- ship. Mr. Calder asked for a character, and Mr. Flueck, in writing it, said he was " rather peculiar, but civil and obliging." Howchin resented the word " peculiar," which he understood to mean an attack on his veracity, and said, " You might as well call me a liar," to which Mr. Flueck replied, " So I will, not for the first time," but subsequently apologized. A few days after, Mr. Flueck's wife found her husband lying dead, and Howchin, who lived in the house, pointed to a bar of iron as the weapon 'with which he must have been killed. There is as yet no evi- dence against him except some blood on his coat, which may have come from attending the murdered man, and his own idea, repeatedly expressed, that he should some day or other become a maniac, but the curious point in the charge is the inadequacy of the motive. Uneducated men constantly,commit murders from temper, but educated men usually require an impulse equal to the risk.
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