I am not going to inflict on the reader a detailed account of this remarkable trial, which turned, as barristers would say, on a beautiful point of circumstantial evidence.  Along with the attorney, a sharp enough person in his way, I examined various parties at the hotel, and made myself acquainted with the nature of the premises.  The more we investigated, however, the more dark and mysterious—­always supposing Harvey’s innocence—­did the whole case appear.  There was not one redeeming trait in the affair, except Harvey’s previous good character; and good character, by the law of England, goes for nothing in opposition to facts proved to the satisfaction of a jury.  It was likewise most unfortunate that A ——­ was to be the presiding judge.  This man possessed great forensic acquirements, and was of spotless private character; but, like the majority of lawyers of that day—­when it was no extraordinary thing to hang twenty men in a morning at Newgate—­he was a staunch stickler for the gallows as the only effectual reformer and safeguard of the social state.  At this time he was but partially recovered from a long and severe indisposition, and the traces of recent suffering were distinctly apparent on his pale and passionless features.

Harvey was arraigned in due form; the evidence was gone carefully through; and everything, so far as I was concerned, was done that man could do.  But at the time to which I refer, counsel was not allowed to address the court on behalf of the prisoner—­a practice since introduced from Scotland—­and consequently I was allowed no opportunity to draw the attention of the jury to the total want of any direct evidence of the prisoner’s guilt.  Harvey himself tried to point out the unlikelihood of his being guilty; but he was not a man gifted with dialectic qualities, and his harangue fell pointless on the understandings of the twelve common-place individuals who sat in the jury-box.  The judge finally proceeded to sum the evidence, and this he did emphatically against the prisoner—­dwelling with much force on the suspicious circumstance of a needy man taking up his abode at an expensive fashionable hotel; his furtive descent from his apartments by the back stairs; the undoubted fact of the watch being found in his trunk; the improbability of any one putting it there but himself; and the extreme likelihood that the robbery was effected in a few moments of time by the culprit, just as he passed from the bar of the hotel to the room which he had occupied.  “If,” said he to the jury, in concluding his address, “you can, after all these circumstances, believe the prisoner to be innocent of the crime laid to his charge, it is more than I can do.  The thing seems to me as clear as the sun at noonday.  The evidence, in short, is irresistible; and if the just and necessary provisions of the law are not enforced in such very plain cases, then society will be dissolved, and security for property there will be none.  Gentlemen, retire and make up your verdict.”