and we possess little or no means of solving it. From what motive this
silent, arrogant man, despising his ineffectual wife, this reserved and
moody scholar stooped to fraud and murder the facts of the case help us
little to determine. Was it the hope of leaving the narrow surroundings
of Knaresborough, his tiresome belongings, his own poor way of life,
and seeking a wider field for the exercise of those gifts of scholarship
which he undoubtedly possessed that drove him to commit fraud in company
with Clark and Houseman, and then, with the help of the latter,
murder the unsuspecting Clark? The fact of his humble origin makes
his association with so low a ruffian as Houseman the less remarkable.
Vanity in all probability played a considerable part in Aram's
disposition. He would seem to have thought himself a superior person,
above the laws that bind ordinary men. He showed at the end no
consciousness of his guilt. Being something of a philosopher, he had
no doubt constructed for himself a philosophy of life which served to
justify his own actions. He was a deist, believing in "one almighty
Being the God of Nature," to whom he recommended himself at the last in
the event of his "having done amiss." He emphasised the fact that his
life had been unpolluted and his morals irreproachable. But his views
as to the murder of Clark he left unexpressed. He suggested as
justification of it that Clark had carried on an intrigue with his
neglected wife, but he never urged this circumstance in his defence, and
beyond his own statement there is no evidence of such a connection.

The Revd. John Selby Watson, headmaster of the Stockwell Grammar School,
at the age of sixty-five killed his wife in his library one Sunday
afternoon. Things had been going badly with the unfortunate man. After
more than twenty-five years' service as headmaster of the school at a
meagre salary of L400 a year, he was about to be dismissed; the
number of scholars had been declining steadily and a change in the
headmastership thought necessary; there was no suggestion of his
receiving any kind of pension. The future for a man of his years
was dark enough. The author of several learned books, painstaking,
scholarly, dull, he could hope to make but little money from literary
work. Under a cold, reserved and silent exterior, Selby Watson concealed
a violence of temper which he sought diligently to repress. His wife's
temper was none of the best. Worried, depressed,