th Fales an injury if she would not go to Wrentham and marry him.

The prisoner's counsel were two very clever young lawyers who afterward
came to be men of great distinction in Massachusetts--no others, in
fact, than Harrison Gray Otis and John Lowell. These men advanced very
clever arguments to show that Elizabeth Fales, maddened by a love which
seemed unlikely ever to end in marriage, had seized from Jason the large
knife which he was using to mend a quill pen as he walked to meet her,
and with this knife had inflicted upon herself the terrible wounds, from
the effect of which she died almost instantaneously. The fact that Jason
was himself wounded in the struggle was ingeniously utilised by the
defence to show that he had received murderous blows from her hand, for
the very reason that he had attempted (unsuccessfully, inasmuch as his
right arm was impaired) to wrest the mad girl's murderous weapon from
her.

The counsel also made much of the fact that, though it was at midday and
many people were not far off, no screams were heard. A vigorous girl
like Elizabeth Fales would not have submitted easily, they held, to any
such assault as was charged. In the course of the trial a very moving
description of the sufferings such a high-strung, ardent nature as this
girl's must have undergone, because of her hopeless love, was used to
show the reasons for suicide. And following the habit of the times, the
lawyers turned their work to moral ends by beseeching the parents in the
crowded court-room to exercise a greater vigilance over the social life
of their young people, and so prevent the possibility of their forming
any such attachment as had moved Elizabeth Fales to take her own life.

Yet all this eloquent pleading was in vain, for the court found Jason
Fairbanks guilty of murder and sentenced him to be hanged. From the
court-room he was taken to the Dedham gaol, but on the night of the
seventeenth of August he was enabled to make his escape through the
offices of a number of men who believed him innocent, and for some days
he was at liberty. At length, however, upon a reward of one thousand
dollars being offered for his apprehension, he was captured near
Northampton, Massachusetts, which town he had reached on his journey to
Canada.

The gallows upon which "justice" ultimately asserted itself is said to
have been constructed of a tree cut from the old Fairbanks place.

The Fairbanks house is still standing, having b