"On Friday afternoon the coroner and a jury sat on the
body of a lady in the neighborhood of Holborn, who died in
consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.
It appeared by the evidence adduced that while the family
were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife
lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little
girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her
infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and
with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her
cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too
late. [7] The dreadful scene presented him the mother lifeless,
pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing
over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father,
weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from
the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks
she had been madly hurling about the room.

"For a few days prior to this, the family had observed
some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased
on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next
morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn; but that gentleman was not at
home.

"The jury of course brought in their verdict,--_Lunacy_."

I need not supply the omitted names of the actors in this harrowing
scene. Mary Lamb was at once placed in the Asylum at Hoxton, and the
victim of her frenzy was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Andrew's,
Holborn. It became necessary for Charles and his father to make an
immediate change of residence, and they took lodgings at Pentonville.