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                         PRICE, 12 1-2 CENTS.

                                  THE
                            LIFE AND DEATH
                                  OF
                         MRS. MARIA BICKFORD,

                      A Beautiful Female, who was
                          INHUMANLY MURDERED,

           In the Moral and Religious City of Boston, on the
                night of the 27th of October, 1845, by

                          ALBERT J. TIRRELL,

           Her Paramour, arrested on board the Ship Sultana,
                    off New Orleans, December 6th.

                            [Illustration]

                   BY A CLERGYMAN, OF BRUNSWICK, ME.

                                BOSTON:
                   PUBLISHED AND FOR SALE BY ALL THE
                          PERIODICAL DEALERS.

                                 1845
                       SECOND EDITION,--REVISED.

        Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845,
                      by SILAS ESTABROOK, in the
Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.




PREFACE.

“I COME NOT TO DESTROY.”--_Our Savior._


For the principal facts embodied in the following narrative, the Author
is indebted to the ill-fated female who is the subject of them. It was
his lot to be the bearer of a letter to her, in the spring of 1845, from
a companion of her childhood. Aware of her forlorn condition, and of
many acts of atrocity which characterized the latter part of her erring
life, he made it his purpose to learn the history of her career, which
was frankly communicated by her own lips.

The Author tenders his acknowledgments to the person who generously
placed in his hands the original letters which reveal the passion flame
of her FIRST LOVE with a medical student of Brunswick, in Maine. The
contents of these letters establish the fact that this student became
her seducer, and that he afterwards heartlessly abandoned her to
remorse, and the jeers of a scoffing world. She was but fifteen years of
age at the time of writing the letters, and they evince not only much
purity and depth of feeling, but likewise a mind endowed with rare
gifts.

It is not a pleasing duty to record the vicissitudes of the unfortunate.
To draw aside the veil which conceals the cherished treasures, the
blighted hopes, and the undying remorse of an erring soul, traced
through long seasons of unredeeming, rayless wo, is to perform a labor
for the benefit of the living. In this the author has striven to be
faithful, impartial, and truthful.

Life, as a spectacle, is but dimly seen and feebly comprehended; as a
mystery, it is unfathomable indeed. Blown, as it were, a bubble--dark as
the transgressions by which it is checkered, it bursts in an hour we
know not, as the globe of glass is dashed into fragments. We look on the
wreck, and wonder why it had a being, to gather in its train a
multitudinous throng of evils, and make its exit in ignominy and shame.
The author, it will be seen, is a fatalist--a believer in an unalterable
destiny. It is unnecessary here to enter into a defence of that
belief--he hopes that all people have an opinion of their own upon this,
as on other subjects.

Ye rich and great! ye poor and destitute--children of sin and wanderers
from virtue--ye world wronged! cast your eyes over the panorama spread
out to your view in the following pages, and, from the sounding depths
of crime, learn lessons of wisdom.




CHAPTER I.

     _Maria’s Birth--Strange Omens at the time of it--Speculations of
     the Old Maids and Old Women concerning the same--Singular Traits of
     her Youth--Mysterious Spiritual Visitings--Meditations in the Woods
     and Fields--Theology and Philosophy--Penitence--Remarks--What
     constitutes True Religion?_


Mrs. Maria Bickford was a native of Oldtown, a small parish near the
city of Bangor, in Maine--the daughter of poor but respectable parents.
Her maiden name was Dunn. She was born in the year 1822, and was,
consequently, twenty-three years old at the period of her awful and
untimely end. It is said of her, that, from earliest childhood, she had
been the sport of ill omens and startling reverses. At her birth, which
occurred before sunrise on a beautiful morning in