the room, was ransacking the chamber in which the girl died, when, in a cavity of the chimney where it had fallen unnoticed, was found a paper written by this girl, declaring her intention to commit suicide, and closing with the words:  ‘My inhuman father is the cause of my death’; thus explaining her dying gestures.  On examination of this document by the friends and relatives of the girl, it was recognized and identified as her handwriting; and it established the fact that the father had died innocent of every crime, except that of trying to save his child from a degrading marriage.

“Now, mark the prompt and satisfactory reparation decreed by justice, and carried out by the officers of the law.  The shrivelled, dishonored body was lowered from the gibbet, given to his relatives for decent burial, and the magistrates who sentenced him, ordered a flag waved over his grave, as compensation for all his wrongs.

“Gentlemen of the jury, to save you from the commission of a wrong even more cruel, I come to-day to set before you clearly the facts, elicited from witnesses which the honorable and able counsel for the prosecution declined to cross-examine.  An able expounder of the law of evidence has warned us that:  ’The force of circumstantial evidence being exclusive in its nature, and the mere coincidence of the hypothesis with the circumstances, being, in the abstract, insufficient, unless they exclude every other supposition, it is essential to inquire, with the most scrupulous attention, what other hypothesis there may be, agreeing wholly or partially with the facts in evidence.’

“A man of very marked appearance was seen running toward the railroad, on the night of the twenty-sixth, evidently goaded by some unusual necessity to leave the neighborhood of X—­before the arrival of the passenger express.  It is proved that he passed the station exactly at the time the prisoner deposed she heard the voice, and the half of the envelope that enclosed the missing will, was found at the spot where the same person was seen, only a few moments later.  Four days afterward, this man entered a small station in Pennsylvania, paid for a railroad ticket, with a coin identical in value and appearance with those stolen from the tin box, and as if foreordained to publish the steps he was striving to efface, accidentally left behind him the trumpet-tongued fragment of envelope, that exactly fitted into the torn strip dropped at the bridge.  The most exhaustive and diligent search shows that stranger was seen by no one else in X—­; that he came as a thief in the night, provided with chloroform to drug his intended victim, and having been detected in the act of burglariously abstracting the contents of the tin box, fought with, and killed the venerable old man, whom he had robbed.