When the writer was acting as an assistant prosecutor in New York County, a young Italian, barely twenty years of age, was brought to the bar charged with assault with intent to kill.  The complainant was a withered Sicilian woman who claimed to be his wife.  Both spoke an almost unintelligible dialect.  The case on its face was simple enough.  An officer testified that on a Sunday morning in Mulberry Bend Park, at a distance of about fifty feet from where he was standing, he saw the defendant, who had been walking peaceably with the complaining witness, suddenly draw a long and deadly looking knife and proceed to slash her about the head and arms.  It had taken the officer but a moment or two to seize the defendant from behind and disarm him, but in the meantime he had inflicted some eleven wounds upon her body.  No explanation had been offered for this terrible assault, and the complainant had appeared involuntarily before the Grand jury and afterward had to be kept in the House of Detention as a hostile witness.  The woman, who appeared to be about fifty years old, was sworn, and on being questioned stated that she had been married to the defendant in Sicily three years before.  She declined to admit that he had attacked or harmed her in any way, constantly mumbling:  “He is my husband.  Do not punish him!”

The defendant, however, seemed eager to get on the stand and to tell his story; nor did the introduction of the knife in evidence or the exhibition of the woman’s wounds embarrass him in the slightest degree.  His manner was that of a man who had only to explain to be entirely exonerated from blame.  He nodded at the jury and the judge, and scowled at the complainant, who was speedily conducted to a place where no harm could possibly come to her.  When at last he was sworn, he could hardly restrain himself into coherency.

“Yes—­that woman forced me to marry her!” he testified in substance.  “But in the eyes of God I am not her husband, for she bewitched me!  Else would I have married an old crone who could not have borne me children?  When her spells weakened I left her and came to America.  Here I met the woman I love, —­Rosina,—­and as I had been bewitched into the other marriage, we lived together as man and wife for two years.  Then one day a friend told me that the old woman had followed me over the sea and was going to throw her spells upon me again.  But I did not inform Rosina of these things.  The next evening she told me that an old woman had been to the house and asked for me.  For days my first wife lurked in the neighborhood, beseeching me to come back to her.  But I told her that in the eyes of God she was not my wife.  Then, in revenge, she cast the evil eye upon the child—­sul bambino —­and for six weeks it ailed and then died.  Again the witch asked me to go with her, and again I refused.  This time she cast her evil eye upon my wife—­and Rosina grew pale and sick and took to her bed.  There was only one thing to do, you understand.  I resolved to slay her, just as you—­giudici —­would have done.  I bought a carving-knife and sharpened it, and asked her to walk with me to the park, and I would have killed her had not the police prevented me.  Wherefore, O giudici!  I pray you to recall her and permit me to kill her or to decree that she be hung!”