Infanticide is not an Irish offence, yet it has been
reserved for an Irishwoman to surpass all Englishwomen who have com- mitted it, and rise at a bound to the wretched supremacy of crime. Mary Darby left the Dungannon Workhouse with an illegitimate child of a year old, and took service in a farmer's house. The baby was a weariness to her, and she devised a plan for disposing of it which, in its slow, deliberate atrocity, surpassed anything ever committed by slave-traders. Through a period of three weeks she continued breaking the baby's bones one by one, till when it died the surgeon found eight broken ribs, a broken shoulder, a fracture of each bone of the left forearm, another of the thigh bone, another of one leg below the knee, another of the upper and lower bones of the right arm, and another of the jaw- bone. The only external appearance was a black lump over each fracture, and the woman had calculated that she could explain the death as caused by these swellings. It is difficult for ordinary men to believe such acts performed by reasonable beings, but there is no suggestion of the insanity which, for the sake of human nature, we trust may be established.
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