erse the argument, and apply it
to Rey. "Who but Rey could have committed this murder?--who but Rey
had a large sum of money to seize upon?--a pistol is found by his side,
balls and powder in his pocket, other balls in his trunks at home. The
pistol found near his body could not, indeed, have belonged to Peytel:
did any man ever see it in his possession? The very gunsmith who sold
it, and who knew Peytel, would he not have known that he had sold him
this pistol? At his own house, Peytel has a collection of weapons of
all kinds; everybody has seen them--a man who makes such collections is
anxious to display them. Did any one ever see this weapon?--Not one.
And Madame Peytel did, in her lifetime, remark a pistol in the valet's
possession. She was short-sighted, and could not particularize what
kind of pistol it was; but she spoke of it to her husband and her
brother-in-law." This is not satisfactory, if you please; but, at least,
it is as satisfactory as the other set of suppositions. It is the very
chain of argument which would have been brought against Louis Rey by
this very same compiler of the act of accusation, had Rey survived,
instead of Peytel, and had he, as most undoubtedly would have been the
case, been tried for the murder.

This argument was shortly put by Peytel's counsel:--"if Peytel had been
killed by Rey in the struggle, would you not have found Rey guilty of
the murder of his master and mistress?" It is such a dreadful dilemma,
that I wonder how judges and lawyers could have dared to persecute
Peytel in the manner which they did.

After the act of accusation, which lays down all the suppositions
against Peytel as facts, which will not admit the truth of one of the
prisoner's allegations in his own defence, comes the trial. The judge is
quite as impartial as the preparer of the indictment, as will be seen by
the following specimens of his interrogatories:--

Judge. "The act of accusation finds in your statement contradictions,
improbabilities, impossibilities. Thus your domestic, who had determined
to assassinate you, in order to rob you, and who MUST HAVE CALCULATED
UPON THE CONSEQUENCE OF A FAILURE, had neither passport nor money upon
him. This is very unlikely; because he could not have gone far with only
a single halfpenny, which was all he had."

Prisoner. "My servant was known, and often passed the frontier without a
passport."

Judge. "YOUR DOMESTIC HAD TO ASSASSINATE TWO PERSONS, and had no w