of the South, were at the time in humble circumstances.  He commented upon her parentage.  Perhaps her agonized father, in his intervals of sanity, was still searching for his lost daughter.  Would he one day hear that she had died a felon’s death?  Society had pursued her, fate had pursued her, and in a moment of delirium she had turned and defied fate and society.  He dwelt upon the admission of base wrong in Col.  Selby’s dying statement.  He drew a vivid, picture of the villain at last overtaken by the vengeance of Heaven.  Would the jury say that this retributive justice, inflicted by an outraged, and deluded woman, rendered irrational by the most cruel wrongs, was in the nature of a foul, premeditated murder?  “Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet.  Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of mercy.  But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; I ask only that justice which you and I shall need in that last, dreadful hour, when death will be robbed of half its terrors if we can reflect that we have never wronged a human being.  Gentlemen, the life of this lovely and once happy girl, this now stricken woman, is in your hands.”

The jury were risibly affected.  Half the court room was in tears.  If a vote of both spectators and jury could have been taken then, the verdict would have been, “let her go, she has suffered enough.”

But the district attorney had the closing argument.  Calmly and without malice or excitement he reviewed the testimony.  As the cold facts were unrolled, fear settled upon the listeners.  There was no escape from the murder or its premeditation.  Laura’s character as a lobbyist in Washington which had been made to appear incidentally in the evidence was also against her:  the whole body of the testimony of the defense was shown to be irrelevant, introduced only to excite sympathy, and not giving a color of probability to the absurd supposition of insanity.  The attorney then dwelt upon, the insecurity of life in the city, and the growing immunity with which women committed murders.  Mr. McFlinn made a very able speech; convincing the reason without touching the feelings.

The Judge in his charge reviewed the, testimony with great show of impartiality.  He ended by saying that the verdict must be acquittal or murder in the first, degree.  If you find that the prisoner committed a homicide, in possession of her reason and with premeditation, your verdict will be accordingly.  If you find she was not in her right mind, that she was the victim of insanity, hereditary or momentary, as it has been explained, your verdict will take that into account.