In a Natchez paper I read as follows:—­“Levi Tarver, formerly a resident of Atala county, was recently killed in Texas.  Tarver interrupted a gentleman on the highway; high words ensued, when Tarver gave the gentleman the lie; whereupon the latter drew a bowie-knife, and completely severed, at one blow, Levi’s head from his body.”

In a St. Louis paper, I read of a German, Hoffman by name, who was supposed by Baker to be too intimate with his wife, and who was consequently desired to discontinue his visits.  Hoffman remonstrated in his reply, assuring the husband that his suspicions were groundless.  A short time after he received a letter from Mrs. Baker, requesting him to call upon her:  he obeyed the summons, and was shown into her bedroom at the hotel.  The moment he got there, Mrs. Baker pulled two pistols from under the pillow, and discharged both at his head.  Hoffman rushed out of the house; scarce was he in the street, when Mr. Baker and three other ruffians pounced upon him, dragged him back to the hotel, and placed guards at the door to prevent any further ingress from the street.  They then stripped him perfectly naked, lashed him with cow-hides till there was scarce a sound piece of flesh in his body, dashing cold water over him at intervals, and then recommencing their barbarities.  When tired of this brutality, they emasculated their wretched victim with a common table-knife.  And who were these ruffians?  Were they uneducated villains, whom poverty and distress had hardened into crime?  Far from it.  Mr. Baker was the owner of a grocery store; of the others, one was the proprietor of the St. Charles hotel, New Bremen; the second was a young lawyer, the third was a clerk in the “Planter’s House.”  Can the sinks of ignorance and vice in any community present a more bloody scene of brutality than was here deliberately enacted, by educated people in respectable positions, in the middle of the day?  What can be thought of the value of human life, when I add that all these miscreants were bailed?

These are merely the accounts which have met my eye in the natural course of reading the newspaper, for I can most truthfully declare I have not taken the slightest trouble to hunt them up.  The following, which bears upon the same point, was related to me in the course of conversation at dinner, and it occurred in New Orleans.  Mr. A. treads on Mr. B.’s too several times; Mr. B. kicks Mr. A. down stairs, and this at a respectable evening party.  Now what does Mr. A. do?  He goes outside and borrows a bowie-knife from a hack-cabman, then returns to the party, watches and follows Mr. B. to the room where the hats and cloaks were placed, seizes a favourable moment, and rips Mr. B.’s bowels open.  He is tried for murder, with evidence sufficient to hang a dozen men; and, to the astonishment of even the Westerns themselves, he is acquitted.  These facts occurred not many years since, and they were narrated to me by a gentleman who was at the party.