All explained itself in a moment: the silent language of the fact made its
own eloquent revelation. The mysterious exterminator of No. 29 Ratcliffe
Highway had visited another house; and, behold! one man only had escaped
through the air, and in his night-dress, to tell the tale.
Superstitiously, there was something to check the pursuit of this
unintelligible criminal. Morally, and in the interests of vindictive
justice, there was everything to rouse, quicken, and sustain it.

Yes, Marr's murderer--the man of mystery--was again at work; at this
moment perhaps extinguishing some lamp of life, and not at any remote
place, but here--in the very house which the listeners to this dreadful
announcement were actually touching. The chaos and blind uproar of the
scene which followed, measured by the crowded reports in the journals of
many subsequent days, and in one feature of that case, has never to my
knowledge had its parallel; or, if a parallel, only in one case--what
followed, I mean, on the acquittal of the seven bishops at Westminster in
1688. At present there was more than passionate enthusiasm. The frenzied
movement of mixed horror and exultation--the ululation of vengeance which
ascended instantaneously from the individual street, and then by a sublime
sort of magnetic contagion from all the adjacent streets, can be
adequately expressed only by a rapturous passage in Shelley:--

'The transport of a fierce and monstrous gladness
Spread through the multitudinous streets, fast flying
Upon the wings of fear:--From his dull madness
The starveling waked, and died in joy: the dying,
Among the corpses in stark agony lying,
Just heard the happy tidings, and in hope
Closed their faint eyes: from house to house replying
With loud acclaim the living shook heaven's cope,