nce said he believed there was a trap laid for him
and exclaimed against Burton. Two women positively deposed that Houghton
all that night was not out of his lodgings. But the jury notwithstanding
that, gave so much credit to the evidence offered for the King, that
they found him guilty.

Under sentence of death, he said that he had hitherto lived free from
most of those enormous vices into which criminals are usually plunged,
who came to his unhappy fate. He said that through the course of his
life he had always been a good husband, a loving parent, and had
provided carefully for his family; that he had served the Government
twelve years by land, and twelve years by sea, and in all that time
never had any reflection upon him until the unhappy accident in the
Guards, which he said he was not guilty of, and had been since confessed
by another man.

As to the fact for which he was to die, he said that the same day the
mail was robbed (which was on a Sunday morning) at six or seven o'clock
he found a bundle of papers which he took up, and perceived them to be a
parcel taken out of the Bristol mail, and therefore having perused them
carefully, and taken out of them such as he judged proper, he being at
that time out of business and in great want, put up the rest of them in
a sheet of paper, directed to the Post Master General, and laid them
down in the box-house at Lincoln's Inn Fields, being afraid to go with
them to the office, because a great reward was offered for the robber.
And that he, having changed a twenty-pound bank-note, paid five pounds
of it away to his landlord, Mr. Marlow. He reflected also very severely
on the evidence given against him by Mr. Burton, which he said was the
very reverse of the truth. Burton having often solicited him to go upon
the highway as the shortest method of easing his misfortunes and
bringing them both money.

As he persisted in averring the confession he made to be the truth, it
was objected to him that it was a story, the most improbable in the
world, that when a man had hazarded his life to rob the Bristol mail, he
should then throw away all the booty, and leave it in such a place as
Covent Garden, for any stranger to take up as he came by; yet neither
this nor anything else that could be said to him had so much weight as
to move him to a free confession of his guilt, but on the contrary, he
gave greater and more evident signs of a sullen, morose and reserved
disposition, spoke