as possible, and that
Mehetabel did not know they were present was almost certain, as
she was looking at Jonas all the while and not in their direction.
The counsel was disappointed, he had hoped to make much of this
point.

Mehetabel was uneasy when she noticed now that the bewigged young
man who had spoken with her at the Hammer Pond labored to bring
out from the witnesses' admissions that would tell against her.
He was not content with the particulars of the death of Jonas, he
went back to the marriage of Mehetabel, and to her early history.
He forced from the Rocliffes, father and son, and also from Colpus
and his daughter the statement that when Mehetabel had been told
her husband was dead she had laughed.

Up to this the feeling of all in court had been unmistakably in her
favor, but now, as in the petty sessions, the knowledge that she
had laughed turned the current of sympathy from her.

When all the evidence had been produced, then the counsel for the
prosecution stood up and addressed the court. The case, said he,
was a peculiarly painful one, for it exhibited the blackest
ingratitude in one who owed, he might say, everything to the
deceased. As the court had heard--the accused had been brought
up in a small wayside tavern, the resort of sailors on their way
between London and Portsmouth, where she had served in the capacity
of barmaid, giving drink to the low fellows who frequented the
public-house, and he need hardly say that such a bringing up must
kill all the modesty, morality, sense of self-respect and common
decency out of a young girl's mind. She was good-looking, and had
been the object of familiarities from the drunken vagabonds who
passed and repassed along the road, and stayed to slake their
thirst, and bandy jokes with the pretty barmaid. From this situation
she had been rescued by Jonas Kink, a substantial farmer. Having
been a foundling she had no name. She had been brought up at the
parish expense, and had no relatives either to curb her propensities
for evil, or to withdraw her from a situation in which no young
woman, he ventured to say, could spend her early years without
moral degradation. It might almost be asserted that Jonas Kink,
the deceased, had lifted this unfortunate creature from the gutter.
He had given her his name, he had given her a home. He had treated
her with uniform kindness--no evidence had been produced that he
had ever maltreated her. On the contrary, as the widow C