DIGITIZED BY PETER KILLACKEY THE BUSHRANGERS - JEFFRIES, THE MONSTER. James Bonwick - 1856 Originally a Scotch seaman, he was always notorious for his vile blackguardism. He was committed to prison at Edinburgh ; but to receive commutation of sentence, and be sooner among his old companions, he proferred his services as Jack Ketch. The first man upon whom he made his experimental trial was Johnson, the Dick Turpin of the North. Immediately after the suspension, the mob of the Modern Athens cut down the body, carried it off, and restored the man to consciousness. But the police succeeded in rescuing the highwayman, and giving him another interview with Jeffries and the rope. It was not long before the hangman of Scotland appeared in Van Diemen's Land. In a period of brief indulgence he was watch-bouse keeper in Launceston. One day the wretch tried his brutal humour upon a poor drunken fellow in his custody. He placed the feet of the insensible man among some hot ashes, until his toes were consumed. The discovery of this barbarous act caused his retreat to the bush, and he then became the terror of the northern settlers. His atrocities were fearfully horrible. He confessed to five murders, and acknowledged that he had no object either of fear, revenge, or avarice, to prompt the bloody deed. One of his victims was his friend and companion.-- But one of his crimes requires a more particular narration. In one of his expeditions he came upon a remote hut; the male inmate was struck senseless, and the wretch told the trembling wife to follow him. Her tears were of no avail with so hardened a being. Having an infant at her breast, she prepared to go after the brute, hut did so with faltering steps, and in an agony of grief. The Bushranger, in coarse oaths, told her to be quicker, or he would have to throttle her. She sought to appease him by representing her condition as a new mother, pleading her weak state, and the weight of the child. The demon turned round with awful curses, snatched the baby from her breast, and dashed its brains out against a tree. Then seizing the frantic mother, he drove her onward at the point of the knife to his own forest den. When this wild beast was hunted down, he was brought into Launceston in triumph. A young woman stood among those who came out to witness another Bushranger. When she caught sight of those hated, but too well-known features, she uttered a yelling scream of " My child ! my child!''-- sprang upon the man in the midst of the soldiers, and would have torn him to pieces, if not violently removed. It was the mother of the murdered infant. There were men of like passions to Jeffries, who once came upon an out-station belonging to a reduced gentleman. In the absence of the proprietor and his two grown up sons, the wretches seized the mother and her beautiful daughter, and detained them prisoners for three weeks; half-dead from brutality and mental suffering, they were then recovered by their agonized friends.