occupied more than half the day.

But it had a rather poor audience. The crowd had rushed into the other
court, where the gentlemen of the grand jury were answering to their
names as often as the infirmities of the clerk of arraigns would allow
them to discover whom he was calling. As soon as the necessary
twenty-three were sworn, Mr. Justice Buller began his charge.

After a few civil remarks on the state of the county as regarded crime
generally, and brief references to some of the other cases, he came to
the all-absorbing topic. And now the reporters, who had sat listlessly
under the infliction of the previous remarks, woke to sudden life, and
every word of his lordship was caught and taken down as eagerly as if
it had dropped from the lips of Shakespeare.

And this is what he said:

'And now I come to what is by far the gravest case in the
calendar--one of the gravest cases that has ever come before me in my
judicial experience. The prisoner, Eleanor Owen, is accused of the
most serious crime, short of treason, known to our law. Gentlemen, it
is not for you to try whether she is guilty. You have to hear the
witnesses who will be sent in before you on behalf of the Crown, and
if you are satisfied that they are speaking the truth, and the effect
of their evidence on your minds is such as, if uncontradicted, to
raise a fair presumption of the prisoner's guilt, then it is your duty
to find a true bill against her. From the depositions taken by the
magistrates, which have been put before me, I do not anticipate that
you will have much hesitation in coming to your decision. The case is
entirely one of what is called circumstantial evidence, as such cases
most generally are, and must be from the nature of things. Doubtless
there are difficulties in the case--many and grave difficulties--with
which it will be the duty of this tribunal to deal when the prisoner
comes, if she does come, before us. The fact that the prisoner is
charged with the deliberate murder of her friend--I may almost say her
benefactress--with whom she had been living on terms of intimacy for a
considerable time, and for no motive that has yet been suggested
except a low and mercenary one, is calculated to arouse a natural
repulsion in the mind, and to indispose it to believe that the charge
is well-founded. But, gentlemen, these things, as they come before
you, are matters of evidence. If the witnesses you are about to hear
satisfy you that there