who had resigned all hope.  The ominous foreboding, which had so overcome him on the fatal morning of the murder, had never left him for a single moment.  From that hour he had looked upon himself as doomed, and had yielded only a passive acquiescence in the measures of defence proposed by his friends, awaiting the fate which he regarded as inevitable with a patience almost apathetic.  Adversity brought out in bold relief qualities that might have sustained a cause whose victories are martyrdoms, but how useless to one requiring active heroism!

All the damaging facts attending the discovery of the murder—­the failure of any signs of a stranger’s presence in the apartment, the peculiar behavior of the accused, the finding of his cravat on the neck of the corpse, his acknowledgment of having worn it on the previous day—­were fully, but impartially, detailed by the witnesses for the Commonwealth.  No one could deny that the circumstances were strongly against the prisoner:  and these shadows, at best, and too often mere delusive mirages of truth, the law allows to be weighed against the life of a man.  Against these shadows all the powers of Breckenridge were taxed to the uttermost; and he might have succeeded, for his eloquence was most persuasive, and his influence over the minds of the people nearly unlimited, had not a false witness appeared to add strength by deliberate perjuries to a case already strong.  It was the ungrateful sister-in-law of the accused, who had owed to him a home and an asylum from the merited scorn of her family and the world, who now came forward to complete the picture of her own detestable character, and put the finishing hand to her unhallowed work, by swearing away that life which her arts had rendered scarcely worth defending, could death have come unaccompanied by disgrace.  With a manner betraying suppressed, but ill-concealed eagerness, and in language prompt and fluent, as if reciting by rote a carefully kept journal, she went on to detail every fault or neglect or impatient act of her relative, not sparing exposure of the most delicate domestic events, at the same time carefully suppressing all mention of his provocations.  In reply to the question, whether she had ever witnessed any violence that led her to fear personal danger to her sister, she replied, that, on one occasion, Captain Wilde, being displeased at something in relation to the preparation of a meal, seized a large carving-knife and flung it at his wife, who only escaped further outrage by flying from the house.  On another occasion, she remembered, he became furiously angry because her sister wished him to see some guests, and, seizing her by the hair, dragged her to the door of his study, and cast her into the hall so violently that she lay senseless upon the floor until accidentally discovered,—­her husband not even calling assistance.  It is easy to imagine what an effect such exposures of the habitual brutality of the man, narrated by a near relation of the sufferer, and interrupted