Calcraft.

Cromwell Argus, Volume I, Issue 11, 19 January 1870, Page 2

Calcraft.

To the ordinary mind there must be a good deal of mystery about Calcraft. What sort of person, being, or " bogie" is it who acts as the law's instrument in sending the worst murderers out of the world, after shaking hands with them beside the drop in the friendliest manner possible ? Does he sleep soundly of nights 1 Does he eat and drink like other people ? What is his favourite reading 1 ? Does he care for politics 1 Is he much given—as Knickerbocker has it—to the vice of thinking ; and has he applied the results of a natural experience to the coinage question 1 That he goes to church we wore long ago told j but we occasionally felt that some slight revelation of the man himself, under his own hand and seal, as it Were, would be worth a good deal more than any possible amount of morbid curiosity could extract from other people. At last we have a characteristic effusion—a real letter to a living man—[published in the last issue of the Argus]—and we turn eagerly to see what it tells us. It appears that once when Mr Calcraft was called to Taunton on a little matter of business connected with his useful avocation, he put up at an inn, and incurred a little score, which, like many a greater man before and since, he neglected to pay. The innkeeper sued him in the County Court, on Tuesday last, and obtained a verdict. Calcraft did not appear, but sent a letter, which was read. From this production we learn that the hangman, when he takes his ease at his inn, stands treat like another Christian ; that he vehemently resents what he thinks an overcharge ; that he has recourse to highly poetical metaphor when the occasion requires figures of fancy as well as of Cocker, and that, in the matter of spelling and grammar, his education has been most decidedly defective. He tells mine host that he is " a Shamed" at his meanness in sending " a piece of paper" to pay the " sorn of 145., which i never had half of it;" that he supposes the innkeeper thought of " fritening" him ; but ho adds, " i was born too near awood to be fritened by an owl - " "The Shiriff" ought to have settled long ago i have sent you the Beasteley bit of paper," and as soon as convnant iwill send you apost office order." Then he concludes with an emphatic declaration that he " never was served such a mean action" in all his life. It is a pity that Mr Calcraft ever took a pen in his hand. After all, he owes something to the public, who would have regarded him as a gruesome mystery if he. kept consistently in the shade ; but who can now be expected to see anything in a man who spells like a kitchen wench, and uses tropes as freoly as Mr George Henry Moore 1 In Calcraft's descent to the County Court, another illusion is destroyed.— Daily Telegraph.