blood on a
table below it. The gaoler, beholding this, detained the man and
called in the magistrates, who extracted from him a confession of his
guilt.

In Herefordshire, in the time of Charles I., Johan Norkett, wife of
Arthur Norkett, was found dead. At first it was thought she had
committed suicide, but afterwards circumstances transpired which led
to the belief that the unfortunate woman did not lay violent hands
upon herself. A jury was summoned, and, after deliberation, the
coroner directed that the body, which had been buried for a month,
should be exhumed, and four suspected persons brought to touch the
corpse. The persons being afterwards brought to trial at the assizes,
an old minister swore that, the body being taken out of the grave and
laid on the grass, the accused were required to touch it. On laying
their hands on the brow, which before was of a livid and carrion
colour, it began to have a dew or gentle sweat upon it, which
increased by degrees until the sweat ran down the face. The brow then
turned to a lifelike and flesh colour, and the dead woman opened one
of her eyes and shut it again, and this opening the eye was done three
times. She likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three
times, and the finger dropped blood on the grass. Another clergyman
corroborated the statement of the first witness. Sir Nicholas Hyde
threw doubt on the correctness of the evidence, but the jury found
three of the prisoners guilty of murder, and two of them were
executed; the third being a woman, escaped with her life.

The popular superstition that the wounds of a murdered person would
bleed afresh when touched by the murderer, is thus referred to by
Shakspeare:

"Dead Henry's wounds
Open their congealed mouths, and bleed afresh;"

And Dryden says:

"If the vile actors of the heinous deed
Near the dead body happily be brought,
Oft hath been proved the breathless corpse will bleed."

That murder might be discovered in the way referred to, was generally
believed in Scotland in the seventeenth century. Sir George Mackenzie,
when conducting the prosecution in the trial of Philip Stansfield,
said: "That divine power which makes the blood circulate during life,
has oft-times, in all nations, opened a passage to it after death upon
such occasions, but most in this case; for after the wounds had been
sewed up, and the body designedly shaken up and down, and, which is
most