"But, gentlemen of the jury, I will not be satisfied with this. My friend must quit that dock without a stain upon his character. It must be in his case as in that of the famous Lord Cowper, who was tried in his youth for murder upon evidence much stronger than any which has been adduced on this occasion, who triumphed over a false accusation, left the court with honour unsullied, and rose to the very highest rank in his profession, holding the first official station in the realm beneath the crown. Nothing will content me but to see my friend so acquitted; and therefore I will not plead the benefit of a doubt. Nothing will content him but such an acquittal; and therefore he forbids me to urge upon the court a fatal flaw which I have discovered in the indictment. But I can ensure that acquittal; and before I have done, I will prove, upon evidence unimpeachable, clear, distinct, and positive, that the prisoner was far distant from the spot at the moment the crime was committed; that it was, in short, physically impossible that he could have had any share in it. I will prove it, by persons above all suspicion of collusion, without motive, without object of favouring or assisting him. I will show, I say, not alone that the man round whom such a long chain of circumstantial evidence has been entwined, did not commit the crime with which he is charged; but that he could not have committed it; and I will call upon you for such an immediate and unhesitating verdict as will leave his name and honour clear of every imputation. Gentlemen of the jury, there is a joyful task before you, after you have performed a long and arduous one. Painful, yet mingled with satisfaction, have been the duties which I have taken upon myself. At first the awful responsibility overwhelmed me; the anxiety for my client, the apprehension for my friend, the sense of my own incompetence, the tremendous stake in peril, seemed too much for my mind; but every step as I have proceeded has strengthened my confidence and reinvigorated my resolution. Knowing my friend's innocence, seeing the proofs of it accumulate, perceiving that the case for the prosecution crumbled away under cross-examination, and assured that without a word for the defence there was in reality no case to go to a jury, I felt that my own weakness could not much affect the result, and that his safely depended not on such feeble powers as mine. To God and to his country he has appealed; to God and to his country I leave his fate, certain that the one will defend, where my voice fails, the other do him justice, whatever powers be arrayed against him." The tears rose in his eyes; his voice trembled and almost failed at the last words; but those last words were as distinctly heard in the court as the most powerful tones of the adverse counsel; for there was a dead silence, unbroken by a breath. CHAPTER XXXIII.