ome, not only for that errand, but
for some other thing that I have to advise with you.' There is no date
of place or day. This letter, harmless enough, was never produced in
Court, and Mr. Barbe supposes that it was a concoction of Hart's. This
is an unlucky conjecture. The Haddington MSS. prove that Sprot really
recited Gowrie's letter, or professed to do so, from memory, in one of
his private examinations. The prosecution never pretended to possess or
produce Gowrie's letter.

Next, Hart cites, _as Logan's answer to Gowrie's first letter_ (which it
was not), the passages already quoted by the prosecution in Sprot's
Indictment, passages out of a letter of Logan's given by Sprot from
memory only. Hart goes on to describe, as if on Sprot's testimony,
certain movements of the Laird's after he received Gowrie's reply to his
own answer to Gowrie. Logan's letter (as given in 1609) is dated July
29, and it is argued that his movements, after receiving Gowrie's reply,
are inconsistent with any share in the plot which failed on August 5.
Even if it were so, the fact is unimportant, for Sprot was really
speaking of movements at a date much earlier than July 29; he later gave
a separate account of what Logan was doing at the time of the outbreak of
the plot, an account _not_ quoted by Hart, who fraudulently or
accidentally confused the dates. And next we find it as good as
explicitly stated, by Hart, that this letter of Logan's to Gowrie was
never produced in open Court. 'Being demanded where this above written
letter, written by Restalrig to the Earl of Gowrie, which was returned
again by James Bower, is now? Deponeth . . . that he (Sprot) left the
above written letter in his chest, among his writings, when he was taken
and brought away, and that it is closed and folded within a piece of
paper,' so Hart declares in Abbot's tract. He falsified the real facts.
He could not give the question as originally put to Sprot, for that
involved the publication of the fact that all the letters but one were
forged. The question in the authentic _private_ report ran thus:
'Demanded where is that letter which Restalrig wrote to the Earl of
Gowrie, _whereupon the said George Sprot wrote and forged the missives
produced_?' (August 10).

The real letter of Logan to Gowrie, the only genuine letter (if in any
sense genuine), had not on August 10 been produced. The others were in
the hands of the Government. Hart, in his tract, veil