no -THE BATH ROAD 



next train to London ; but information was tele- 

 graplied to town, and being arrested as he stepped 

 from tlie carriage at Paddington, be was subsequently 

 tried and hanged. The telegraphist warned the othcials 

 at Paddington to look out for a man dressed like 

 a Quaker. It is a siogular circumstaDce that the 

 original telegraphic code did not comprise any signal 

 for the letter "Q;" but the telegraphist was not to 

 be beateu. He spelled the word " Kwaker." Sir 

 Francis Head has recorded how he was travelling 

 along the line, months after, in a crowded carriage. 

 " Not a word had been spoken since the train left 

 London, but as we neared Slough Station, a short- 

 bodied, short-necked, short-nosed, exceedingly re- 

 spectable-looking man in the corner, fixing his eyes 

 on the apparently fleeting wires, nodded to us as he 

 muttered aloud, " Them's the cords that hung John 

 Tawell ! " * 



* Tawell had poisoned his sweetheart, who, before dying, had 

 time to denounce him to her friends. They pursued him to the 

 station, hut when they arrived there the train had gone. The 

 telesrram sent was in these words : — 



"A murder has just been committed at Salt Hill, and the sus- 

 pected murderer was seen to take a first-class ticket for London by 

 the train which left Slough at 7.42 p.m. He is in the garb of a 

 Quaker, with a brown great-coat on, which reaches nearly to his 

 feet. He is in the last compartment of the second-class carriage." 



At Paddington he took a City omnibus, but the conductor was 

 a policeman in disguise, and dogged his footsteps from one coffee- 

 house to another, which he is supposed to have entered for the 

 purpose of setting up an alili. At length, as he was stepping 

 into a lodging-house in the City, the police tapped him on the 

 shoulder, with the question, " Haven't you just come from 

 Slough ? " Tawell confusedly denied the fact, but he was arrested, 

 with the result already recounted. 



