arks about the
throat, and not to have opened their eyes a little wider, when the
murderer's cottage was within five hundred yards of that open lawn-door!

Then again--when Mr. Jennings, in his strict and searching way, accused
the culprit, he never saw a man so confused in all his life! and on
repeating the charge before those two constables, they all witnessed his
guilty consternation: experienced men, too, they were, and never saw a
felon if Acton wasn't one; the dogged manner in which he went with them
so quietly was quite sufficient; innocent men don't go to jail in that
sort of way, as if they well deserved it.

But, strongest of all, if any shadow of a doubt remained, the most
fearful proof of Roger's guilt lay in the scrap of shawl--the little
leather bags--and the very identical crock of gold! There it was,
nestled in the thatch within a yard of his head, as he lay in bed at
noon-day guarding it.

One proof, weaker than the weakest of all these banded together, has ere
now sufficed to hang the guilty; and many, many fears have I that this
multitude of seeming facts, conspiring in a focus against Roger Acton,
will be quite enough to overwhelm the innocent. "Nothing lies like a
fact," said Dr. Johnson: and statistics prove it, at least as well as
circumstantial evidence.

The matter was as clear as day-light, and long before the trial came
about, our poor labourer had been hanged outright in the just judgment
of Hurstley-cum-Piggesworth.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

PRISON COMFORTS.

MANY blessings, more than he had skill to count, had visited
poor Acton in his cell. His gentle daughter Grace, sweet minister of
good thoughts--she, like a loving angel, had been God's instrument of
penitence and peace to him. He had come to himself again, in solitude,
by nights, as a man awakened from a feverish dream; and the hallowing
ministrations of her company by day had blest reflective solitude with
sympathy and counsel.

Good-wife Mary, too, had been his comforting and cheering friend.
Immediately the crock of gold had been taken from its ambush in the
thatch, it seemed as if the chill which had frozen up her heart had been
melted by a sudden thaw. Roger Acton was no longer the selfish prodigal,
but the guiltless, persecuted penitent; her care was now to soothe his
griefs, not to scold him for excesses; and indignation at the false and
bloody charge made him appear a martyr in her eyes. As to his accuser,
Jennings, M