womanhood as the prisoner presents, could deliberately plan and execute the vile scheme of theft and murder?  Gentlemen, she is guilty of but one sin against the peace and order of this community:  the sin of withholding the name of one for whose bloody crime she is not responsible.  Does not her invincible loyalty, her unwavering devotion to the craven for whom she suffers, in vest her with the halo of a martyrdom, that appeals most powerfully to the noblest impulses of your nature, that enlists the warmest, holiest sympathies lying deep in your manly hearts?  Analyze her statement; every utterance bears the stamp of innocence; and where she cannot explain truthfully, she declines to make any explanation.  Hers is the sin of silence, the grievous evasion of justice by non-responsion, whereby the danger she will not avert by confession recoils upon her innocent head.  Bravely she took on her reluctant shoulders the galling burden of parental command, and stifling her proud repugnance, obediently came—­a fair young stranger to ’Elm Bluff.’  Receiving as a loan the money she came to beg for, she hurries away to fulfil another solemnly imposed injunction.

“Gentlemen, is there any spot out yonder in God’s Acre, where violets, blue as the eyes that once smiled upon you, now shed their fragrance above the sacred dust of your dead darlings; and the thought of which melts your hearts and dims your vision?  Look at this mournful, touching witness, which comes from that holy cemetery to whisper to your souls, that the hands of the prisoner are as pure as those of your idols, folded under the sod.  Only a little bunch of withered brown flowers, tied with a faded blue ribbon, that a poor girl bought with her hard earned pennies, and carried to a sick mother, to brighten a dreary attic; only a dead nosegay, which that mother requested should be laid as a penitential tribute on the tomb of the mother whom she had disobeyed; and this faithful young heart made the pilgrimage, and left the offering—­and in consequence thereof, missed the train that would have carried her safely back to her mother—­and to peace.  On the morning after the preliminary examination I went to the cemetery, and found the fatal flowers just where she had placed them, on the great marble cross that covers the tomb of ‘Helena Tracey—­wife of Luke Darringtun.’

“You husbands and fathers who trust your names, your honor, the peace of your hearts-almost the salvation of your souls—­to the women you love:  staking the dearest interest of humanity, the sanctity of that heaven on earth—­your stainless homes—­upon the fidelity of womanhood, can you doubt for one instant, that the prisoner will accept death rather than betray the man she loves?  No human plummet has sounded the depths of a woman’s devotion; no surveyor’s chain will ever mark the limits of a woman’s faithful, patient endurance; and only the wings of an archangel can transcend that pinnacle to which the sublime principle of self-sacrifice exalts a woman’s soul.