ay, and from
hour to hour, of people in the humblest rank was laid open, shews the
great capabilities of our public jury-system for getting at the truth.
One part of the case was, the absurdity of Elizabeth Canning's story,
and its inconsistency, in minute particulars, with itself and with the
concomitant facts. When her first description of the room, in which,
she said, she was shut up, was compared with the full survey of it
afterwards undertaken, important and fatal discrepancies were proved.
She professed to have been unable to see anything going on in the
house from her place of confinement, but in the room at Enfield Wash
there was a large hole through the floor for a jack-rope, which gave a
full view of the kitchen, where the inmates of the house chiefly
resorted. She professed to describe every article in the room she was
confined in, but she had said nothing of a very remarkable chest of
drawers found in that which she identified as the same. That this
piece of furniture had not been recently placed there was made
evident, by the damp dust gluing it to the wall, and the host of
spiders which ran from their webs when it was removed. She had escaped
by stepping on a penthouse, but there was none against the garret of
Mrs Wells's house; the windows were high, and she could not have
leaped to the ground without severe injury. She stated that no one had
entered the room during the four weeks of her imprisonment, but it was
shewn that, during the period, a lodger had held an animated
conversation from one of the windows of the identical garret with
somebody occupied in lopping wood outside. Nay, a person had seen a
poor woman, with the odd name of Natis, in bed in that very room. His
reason for entering it was a curious one, which has almost a
historical bearing. He went to try the ironwork of a sign which had
once hung in front of the house, and lay in the garret. The sign had
been taken down when the Jacobite army penetrated into England in the
Rebellion of 1745. Probably it had been of a character likely to be
offensive to the Jacobites, and its removal is a little incident,
shewing how greatly the country apprehended a revolution in favour of
the Stuarts.

These discrepancies were, however, far from being the most remarkable
part of the evidence. Not content with shewing that Elizabeth Canning
had told falsehoods, the prosecutor set to the laborious task of
proving where the gipsy woman had been, along with her