Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1876 — Donn Piatt and the Dynamite Fiend. [ARTICLE]

Donn Piatt and the Dynamite Fiend.

We sailed front Liverpool on the 14th of October last, in the steamship Celtic. Among the passengers, and our roommate, was the late anil now infamous Thomas. He was a stout man, weighing probably 240, had tawny red hair and beard, and wore gold-mounted glasses. We remember him as a handsome, sociable sort of man, and, looking back now. as about the last on shipboard to select as one capable of such a crime. The facts come to us so horribly unnatural and hideously grotesque that they resolve themselves into a sort of nightmare, and we caunot realize that the man we sat with and talked to was the fiend events have since proven him to have been. We had an unusually smooth and pleasant voyage, and about the decks* young girls and mothers and beautiful children were promenading and playing all the while in the sunlight; and how that man could have looked on and listened, and yet kept unaltered or unshaken in his terrible purpose, is more than we can comprehend. , To those who have crossed the Atlantic in these steamships the crime is doubly horrible. To have such a freight of living humanity suddenly hurled into eternity, leaving’ behind no w reck, no trace by which the tragedy could be told, enveloping the loss in an impenetrable mystery’, makes one shrink and shudder more than any other crime known. And vetthatman ate heartily, slept soundly, and to all appearance enjoyed life as’ happily as the most innocent child on board. What made the matter the more striking was that the fiend had failed in liis design on the very people with whom he associated. Had he succeeded in getting his infernal •tacliffle insured he would probably have left us at Queenstown, after winding and setting hisboxed-updeath, andthedoomed vessel and her unoffending freight of passengers never would have been heard of after.— Washington Capital.