“15.  There is an absolutely overwhelming mass of testimony to show that an hour before the shooting, McFarland was anxious and uneasy, and that five minutes after it he was excited. Thus the accumulating conjectures and evidences of insanity culminate in this sublime and unimpeachable proof of it.  Therefore—­

“Your Honor and Gentlemen—­We the jury pronounce the said Daniel McFarland Innocent of murder, but calamitously insane.”

The scene that ensued almost defies description.  Hats, handkerchiefs and bonnets were frantically waved above the massed heads in the courtroom, and three tremendous cheers and a tiger told where the sympathies of the court and people were.  Then a hundred pursed lips were advanced to kiss the liberated prisoner, and many a hand thrust out to give him a congratulatory shake—­but presto! with a maniac’s own quickness and a maniac’s own fury the lunatic assassin of Richardson fell upon his friends with teeth and nails, boots and office furniture, and the amazing rapidity with which he broke heads and limbs, and rent and sundered bodies, till nearly a hundred citizens were reduced to mere quivering heaps of fleshy odds and ends and crimson rags, was like nothing in this world but the exultant frenzy of a plunging, tearing, roaring devil of a steam machine when it snatches a human being and spins him and whirls him till he shreds away to nothingness like a “Four o’clock” before the breath of a child.

The destruction was awful.  It is said that within the space of eight minutes McFarland killed and crippled some six score persons and tore down a large portion of the City Hall building, carrying away and casting into Broadway six or seven marble columns fifty-four feet long and weighing nearly two tons each.  But he was finally captured and sent in chains to the lunatic asylum for life.

(By late telegrams it appears that this is a mistake.—­Editor Express.)

But the really curious part of this whole matter is yet to be told.  And that is, that McFarland’s most intimate friends believe that the very next time that it ever occurred to him that the insanity plea was not a mere politic pretense, was when the verdict came in.  They think that the startling thought burst upon him then, that if twelve good and true men, able to comprehend all the baseness of perjury, proclaimed under oath that he was a lunatic, there was no gainsaying such evidence and that he unquestionably was insane!

Possibly that was really the way of it.  It is dreadful to think that maybe the most awful calamity that can befall a man, namely, loss of reason, was precipitated upon this poor prisoner’s head by a jury that could have hanged him instead, and so done him a mercy and his country a service.

Postscript-Later

May 11—­I do not expect anybody to believe so astounding a thing, and yet it is the solemn truth that instead of instantly sending the dangerous lunatic to the insane asylum (which I naturally supposed they would do, and so I prematurely said they had) the court has actually set him at liberty.  Comment is unnecessary.  M. T.