At Hertford resided an opulent Quaker family named Stout.  A pretty young woman of this family had lately sunk into a melancholy of a kind not very unusual in girls of strong sensibility and lively imagination who are subject to the restraints of austere religious societies.  Her dress, her looks, her gestures, indicated the disturbance of her mind.  She sometimes hinted her dislike of the sect to which she belonged.  She complained that a canting waterman who was one of the brotherhood had held forth against her at a meeting.  She threatened to go beyond sea, to throw herself out of window, to drown herself.  To two or three of her associates she owned that she was in love; and on one occasion she plainly said that the man whom she loved was one whom she never could marry.  In fact, the object of her fondness was Spencer Cowper, who was already married.  She at length wrote to him in language which she never would have used if her intellect had not been disordered.  He, like an honest man, took no advantage of her unhappy state of mind, and did his best to avoid her.  His prudence mortified her to such a degree that on one occasion she went into fits.  It was necessary, however, that he should see her, when he came to Hertford at the spring assizes of 1699.  For he had been entrusted with some money which was due to her on mortgage.  He called on her for this purpose late one evening, and delivered a bag of gold to her.  She pressed him to be the guest of her family; but he excused himself and retired.  The next morning she was found dead among the stakes of a mill dam on the stream called the Priory River.  That she had destroyed herself there could be no reasonable doubt.  The coroner’s inquest found that she had drowned herself while in a state of mental derangement.  But her family was unwilling to admit that she had shortened her own life, and looked about for somebody who might be accused of murdering her.  The last person who could be proved to have been in her company was Spencer Cowper.  It chanced that two attorneys and a scrivener, who had come down from town to the Hertford assizes, had been overheard, on that unhappy night, talking over their wine about the charms and flirtations of the handsome Quaker girl, in the light way in which such subjects are sometimes discussed even at the circuit tables and mess tables of our more refined generation.  Some wild words, susceptible of a double meaning, were used about the way in which she had jilted one lover, and the way in which another lover would punish her for her coquetry.  On no better grounds than these her relations imagined that Spencer Cowper had, with the assistance of these three retainers of the law, strangled her, and thrown her corpse into the water.  There was absolutely no evidence of the crime.  There was no evidence that any one of the accused had any motive to commit such a crime; there was no evidence that Spencer Cowper had any connection with the persons who were said to be his accomplices.  One of those