seem to bear hard upon the prisoner, in
the light of his innocence, and not of his guilt, and that they would
all fade into nothing. What mattered his possession of the watch and
other trinkets? Lovers as they were, might not the unhappy girl have
given them to him for temporary keepsakes? Or might he not have taken
them from her in some playful mood, or received them--(and the brooch
was cracked, and the mainspring of the watch broken, though the glass
was whole)--to get them repaired in the town, which he often visited,
and she never? Could human credulity for one moment believe, that such a
man as the prisoner at the bar had been sworn to be by a host of
witnesses--and especially by that witness, who, with such overwhelming
solemnity, had declared he loved him as his own son, and would have been
proud if Heaven had given him such a son--he who had baptised him, and
known him well ever since a child--that such a man could _rob_ the body
of her whom he had violated and murdered? If, under the instigation of
the devil, he had violated and murdered her, and for a moment were made
the hideous supposition, did vast hell hold that demon whose voice would
have tempted the violator and murderer--suppose him both--yea, that man
at the bar--sworn to by all the parish, if need were, as a man of
tenderest charities, and generosity unbounded--in the lust of lucre,
consequent on the satiating of another lust--to rob his victim of a few
trinkets! Let loose the wildest imagination into the realms of wildest
wickedness, and yet they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for a
moment the union of such appalling and such paltry guilt, _in that man_
who now trembled not before them, but who seemed cut off from all the
sensibilities of this life by the scythe of Misery that had shorn him
down! But why try to recount, however feebly, the line of defence taken
by the speaker, who on that day seemed all but inspired? The sea may
overturn rocks, or fire consume them till they split in pieces; but a
crisis there sometimes is in man's destiny, which all the powers ever
lodged in the lips of man, were they touched with a coal from heaven,
cannot avert, and when even he who strives to save, feels and knows that
he is striving all in vain--ay, vain as a worm--to arrest the tread of
Fate about to trample down its victim into the dust. All hoped--many
almost believed--that the prisoner would be acquitted--that a verdict of
"Not Proven," at least,