bt about the result of their
conviction, I sentenced them to penal servitude.

I then undertook to watch the case on behalf of the young man myself,
and did not, as I might have done, assign him counsel.

The prisoner was put up for trial, and the second inquiry commenced.
It had struck me during the night that there was a point in the case
which had been taken for granted by the _counsel on both sides_, and
that that point was _the_ one on which the verdict had gone wrong. As
I have said, I did not doubt the honest belief of the keeper, but I
doubted, and, in fact, disbelieved altogether in, the power of any man
to identify the face of another when their eyes were close together,
as he had no ordinary but a distorted view of the features. In order
to test my theory on this matter, I took the real point in the case,
as it afterwards turned out to be. It was this: _Five men_ were taken
_for granted_ to have been in the gang and in the field on that
occasion. The difficulty was to prove that there were only _four_, and
then to show that the young man was not one of the four. These two
difficulties lay before me, but I resolved to test them to the utmost
of my ability. The Crown was against me and the Treasury counsel.

I knew pretty well where to begin--which is a great point, I think,
in advocacy--and began in the right place. I must repeat that the
prisoner boldly asserted, when the evidence was given as to the
finding of his cap close to the spot where the outrage was committed,
that it _was_ his cap, but that he had not worn it on that night,
having lent it to one of the other men, whom he then named. This was,
to my mind, a very important point in this second trial, and I made
a note of it to assist me at a later period of the case. If this was
true, the strong corroboration of the keeper's evidence of identity
was gone. Indeed, it went a good deal further in its value than that,
for it may have been the finding of the prisoner's cap that induced
the belief that the man whose face he saw was the prisoner's!

I asked the accused if he would like the other men called to prove
his statements, warning him at the same time that it was upon his own
evidence that they had been arrested, and pointing out the risk he ran
from their ill-will.

"My lord," said he, "they will owe me no ill-will, and they will not
deny what I say. It's true; I'm one of 'em, and I know they won't deny
it."

Without discarding this evidence