“It might, my lord.”

“And would not that in your judgment, instead of showing that he was insane, prove that he was a very sensible man?”

The Vicar did not quite assent to this, and as he would not dissent from the learned Judge, said nothing.

“And,” continued Maule, “that he was perfectly sane, although he murdered his wife?”

All this was very clever, not to say facetious, on the part of the learned Judge; but as I had yet to address the jury, I was resolved to take the other view of the effect of the Vicar’s sermons, and I did so.  I worked Maule’s quarry, I think, with some little effect:  for after all his most strenuous exertions to secure a conviction, the jury believed, probably, that no man’s mind could stand the ordeal; and, further, that any doubt they might have, after seeing the two children of the prisoner in court dressed in little black frocks, and sobbing bitterly while I was addressing them, would be given in the prisoner’s favour, which it was.

This incident in my life is not finished.  On the same evening I was dining at the country house of a Mr. Hardcastle, and near me sat an old inhabitant of the village where the tragedy had been committed.

“You made a touching speech, Mr. Hawkins,” said the old inhabitant.

“Well,” I answered, “it was the best thing I could do in the circumstances.”

“Yes,” he said; “but I don’t think you would have painted the little home in such glowing colours if you had seen what I saw last week when I was driving past the cottage.  No, no; I think you’d have toned down a bit.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“Why,” said the old inhabitant, “the little children who sobbed so violently in court this morning, and to whom you made such pathetic reference, were playing on an ash-heap near their cottage; and they had a poor cat with a string round its neck, swinging backwards and forwards, and as they did so they sang,—­

  This is the way poor daddy will go! 
  This is the way poor daddy will go!’

Such, Mr. Hawkins, was their excessive grief!”

Yes, but it got the verdict.

CHAPTER VI.

AN INCIDENT ON THE ROAD TO NEWMARKET.

My first visit to Newmarket Heath had one or two little incidents which may be interesting, although of no great importance.  The Newmarket of to-day is not quite the same Newmarket that it was then:  many things connected with it have changed, and, above all, its frequenters have changed; and if “things are not what they seem,” they do not seem to me, at all events, to be what they were “in my day.”

Sixty years is a long space of time to traverse, but I do so with a very vivid recollection of my old friend Charley Wright.

It was on a bright October morning when we set out, and glad enough was I to leave the courts at Westminster and the courts of the Temple—­glad enough to break loose from the thraldom of nothing to do and get away into the beautiful country.