THE RUGBY ROMANCE.
ACASE has been heard this week in the police-courts which de- serves somethiir more than the brief record we usually bestow on such things, not inaeed for its moral, for it has none, bat simply as a story. Novelists have abandoned the ideas of children changed at nurse, lost, stolen, or otherwise placed in situations violently con- trasted with their natural position, as a machinery too inartistic and improbable for an improved taste. Yet here, in England, we are assured, on evidence which, though ex parte, seems irresistible as to the facts, that a man of good birth and education, connected with the best circles, in the enjoyment of a large income, stole his own infant daughter from his wife, and gave her away to a beggar to be disposed of in the best way she could contrive; that the child remained two years alive, though handed about from one prostitute to another, and that it was ultimately recovered in a den, the description of which seems to admit us to the very arcana of human misery'. Some years since Mr. R. Guinness Hill, a nephew of the well- known brewer of Dublin, married in Brussels Miss Burdett, a grand- daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, and heiress of property estimated at 14,000/. a year. The lady was only sixteen, and her friends settled her possessions on herself, reserving, however, a life-interest in the whole, very moderate pin-money excepted, to the husband. Mr. Hill lived happily with his wife, and she was induced to make a will, devising the entire property to him in the event of no child surviving her decease. In 1859 a child was born at Rugby, and it is alleged that the father from the first plotted for its removal. En- mediately after its birth he went to the registrar and had the child registered in a false name, and persuaded the mother to have it put out to nurse. (We of course are only recounting assertions.) He went to London, and meeting a beggar-woman in the Haymarket, promised her 16/. a year if she would take charge of a child, adding, the woman says, that she might dispose of it in some workhouse or asylum. The woman consented, and Mr. Hill wrote to his wife that he had made satisfactory arrangements for the child. The baby was accordingly sent up to town with its nursemaid, a girl of fourteen, and handed over to two women whose appearance induced her to tell her mistress that all was not right. Mrs. Hill constantly asked for the child, and at last, after two years, insisted upon seeing it. Mr. Hill then subjected her to gross ill-usage, and she separated from him, but consented at his request to return if he would tell her the fate of the child. Getting only contradictory answers, she placed the matter in the hands of a solicitor, and the detectives endeavoured to discover the child. Hopeless as the quest appeared, they succeeded. An offer of a reward, spread about by handbills in a low neighbour- hood, brought up a woman who had accidentally heard the story from time woman who had taken the child, and the officer hunting St. Giles's, den by den, at last went to a filthy alley called Lincoln's- court, in Drury-lane. "In one of the houses in this place he dis- covered the woman Andrews, and he also traced the child into her possession. After searching various rooms, Brett proceeded to a small apartment on the second floor. In one corner lay a man nearly naked, apparently in a dying state, and squatting all over the floor were several women in a most ragged and miserable condition. The whole place was in a dreadful state, the stench from the filth being almost overpowering. On the floor in this horrible den Brett discovered the heir to 14,0001. a year—almost in a state of nudity, and covered with vermin and filth. No shoes were on his feet, and only one dirty rag enveloped the entire body. The toes were terribly scarred with the impressions of wounds, no doubt inflicted by walk- ing on stones; while the head and body generally showed unmis- takable marks of neglect and ill-usage. The house from bottom to top appeared to be occupied by prostitutes and beggars." The little thing was restored to its mother, and the police laid a trap for Mr. Hill, then on the Continent. They forwarded him his wife's address, and he came over to London, apparently to watch her, and was im- mediately arrested for falsifying the register. He was admitted to bail, but no one would come forward, and he lies in prison awaiting trial. It is said that he cannot be charged except upon this com- paratively slight offence, because the remainder of his proceedings were strictly legal. A charge of cruelty, however, the facts being granted, would surely lie; and a charge of murder, for which there was ample primei facie ground, would have speedily compelled the father to produce the child. The strangest features in this case, stranger even than the romance of the incidents, are the utter inadequacy of the motive assigned for an act as heartless as a murder, and the utter stupidity of the means employed. Mr. Hill himself, it is stated, had arlife interest in the property, and could not have benefited personally even by the death of his unfortunate child. He could not even have sold the reversion, for it was dependent on three contingencies—that his wife did not alter her will, that she did not outlive him, and that she had no more children born to him. The little statement we have italicized above is, in fact, the most unintelligible in the whole account.. Either Mr. Hill acted from motives entirely different from those assigned to him, or he must have contemplated a similar disappearance of any future children—a protracted career of crime carried out in order to provide against his surviving a wife years younger than himself— almost an impossibility. The astounding folly of the means adopted for the removal of the child almost equalled their heartlessness. No effort seems to have been made to stop the nursemaid's mouth, and no man in his senses would have reckoned on a mother remaining two entire years without a sight of her child. There was, moreover, the standing possibility of recoE,,nition by the woman to whom the child had been entrusted, and with it the perpetual fear that the end for which everything had been sacrificed would never be attained. It is difficult to believe that the facts of the case are yet before the public.
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