And now it was that the unpopularity resulting from Captain Wilde’s official employment manifested its most baleful effects.  Had he possessed at this crisis the same general good-will he had enjoyed four years before, he might have bid defiance to the rage of his enemies, and have escaped, in spite of all the suspicious circumstances by which he stood environed.  For the general drift of sentiment in the West has always been against capital penalties, and it is next to impossible to carry such penalties into effect against a popular favorite.  In a country like this we might as soon expect to see the hands of a clock move in a direction contrary to the machinery by which it is governed, as a jury to run counter to plainly declared popular feelings.  There may now and then be instances of their acquitting contrary to the general sentiment, where that sentiment is unimpassioned; but we much doubt whether there has ever occurred a single example of a jury convicting a person in whose favor the sympathy of a whole community was warmly and earnestly expressed.  Of such sympathy Captain Wilde had none; for to the great majority he was known only as the exciseman, and as such was an object of hostility.  Not that this hostility at any time took the form of insult and abuse,—­for we are proud to say that outside of the large towns such disgraceful exhibitions of feeling are unknown,—­but it left the minds of the general mass liable to be operated on by all the suspicious circumstances of the case, and by the slanders of the personal enemies of the accused.

On the 23d of November, an immense crowd of people, both men and women, were assembled in the court-house at ——­ to witness a trial which was to fix a dark stain on the judicial annals of Kentucky, and in which, for the thousandth time, a court of justice was to be led fatally astray by the accursed thing called Circumstantial Evidence, and made the instrument of that most deplorable of all human tragedies, a formal, legalized murder.  It is one of the most glaring inconsistencies of our law, that it admits, in a trial where the life of a citizen is at stake, a species of testimony which it regards as too inconclusive and too liable to misconstruction to be allowed in a civil suit involving, it may be, less than the value of a single dollar.  True, it is a favorite maxim of prosecutors, that “circumstances will not lie”; but it requires little acquaintance with the history of criminal trials to prove that circumstantial evidence has murdered more innocent men than all the false witnesses and informers who ever disgraced courts of justice by their presence; and the slightest reflection will convince us that this shallow sophism contains even less practical truth than the general mass of proverbs and maxims, proverbially false though they be.  For not only is the chance of falsehood, on the part of the witness who details the circumstances, greater,—­since a false impression can be conveyed with far less risk of detection by distortion