agedy," by W. E. Bigelow.

It is not often that the gaunt spectre of murder invades the cloistered
calm of academic life. Yet such a strange and unwonted tragedy befell
Harvard University in the year 1849, when John W. Webster, Professor of
Chemistry, took the life of Dr. George Parkman, a distinguished citizen
of Boston. The scene of the crime, the old Medical School, now a Dental
Hospital, is still standing, or was when the present writer visited
Boston in 1907. It is a large and rather dreary red-brick, three-storied
building, situated in the lower part of the city, flanked on its west
side by the mud flats leading down to the Charles River. The first
floor consists of two large rooms, separated from each other by the main
entrance hall, which is approached by a flight of steps leading up
from the street level. Of these two rooms, the left, as you face the
building, is fitted up as a lecture-room. In the year 1849 it was
the lecture-room of Professor Webster. Behind the lecture-room is a
laboratory, known as the upper laboratory, communicating by a private
staircase with the lower laboratory, which occupies the left wing of the
ground floor. A small passage, entered by a door on the left-hand side
of the front of the building, separated this lower laboratory from the
dissecting-room, an out-house built on to the west wall of the college,
but now demolished. From this description it will be seen that any
person, provided with the necessary keys, could enter the college by
the side-door near the dissecting room on the ground floor, and pass
up through the lower and upper laboratory into Professor Webster's
lecture-room without entering any other part of the building. The
Professor of Chemistry, by locking the doors of his lecture-rooms and
the lower laboratory, could, if he wished, make himself perfectly secure
against intrusion, and come and go by the side-door without attracting
much attention. These rooms are little altered at the present time from
their arrangement in 1849. The lecture-room and laboratory are used for
the same purposes to-day; the lower laboratory, a dismal chamber, now
disused and somewhat rearranged, is still recognisable as the scene of
the Professor's chemical experiments.

On the second floor of the hospital is a museum, once anatomical, now
dental. One of the principal objects of interest in this museum is a
plaster cast of the jaws of Dr. George Parkman, made by a well-known
dentist of Bo