at proper intervals by sobs and tears, would have upon an impulsive jury, obliged to derive their knowledge of the case wholly from such a source, and already strongly impressed by the circumstantial details with a presumption unfavorable to the defendant.  Now, since there were other persons in the court-house who had witnessed these two scenes of alleged maltreatment, it may seem strange that they were not brought forward to contradict this woman on those two points, which would at once have destroyed the effect of her entire testimony,—­the maxim, Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus, being always readily applied in such cases.  Had this been done, a reaction of popular feeling would almost certainly have followed in favor of the accused, which might have borne him safely through, in spite of all the presumptive proof against him.  For nothing is truer than Lord Clarendon’s observation, that, “when a man is shown to be less guilty than he is charged, people are very apt to consider him more innocent than he may actually be.”  But in this case the falsehood was secured from exposure by its very magnitude, until it was too late for such exposure to be of any benefit to the prisoner.  The persons who had beheld the scenes as they really occurred never thought of identifying them with brutal outrages, now narrated under oath, at which their hearts grew hard toward the unmanly perpetrator as they listened.

Against the strong array of facts and fictions presented by the prosecution the only circumstance that could be urged by the counsel for the prisoner was, that the child was murdered along with the mother; and this could only avail to strengthen a presumption of innocence, had innocence been otherwise rendered probable; but when a conviction of his guilt had been arrived at already, it merely served to increase the atrocity of his crime, and to insure the enforcement of its penalty.

After a two days’ struggle, in which every resource of reason and eloquence was exhausted by the defendant’s counsel, the judge proceeded to a summing up which left the jury scarcely an option, even had they been inclined to acquit.  The latter withdrew in the midst of a deep and solemn silence, while the respectful demeanor of the spectators showed that at last a feeling of pity was beginning to steal into their hearts for the unhappy gentleman, who still sat, as he had done during those two long days of suspense, with his face buried in his hands, as motionless as a statue.  A profound stillness reigned in the hall during the absence of the jury, broken only occasionally by a stifled sob from some of the ladies present.  After an absence of less than an hour the jury returned and handed in a written verdict; and as the fatal word “Guilty” fell from the white lips of the agitated clerk, the calmest face in that whole vast assembly was that of him whom it doomed to the ignominious death of a felon.  And calm he had been ever since the dreadful morning of his arrest; for the vial of