Half an hour--an hour elapsed, and yet the corregidor did not return, during which time the feelings of my heart may easily be conceived. At length, however, he came, but never, before or since, have I beheld such a change take place in any man so rapidly. I have seen age come on by slow degrees, one year after another, stealing still some faculty or some power, till all was nothing--I have seen rapid disease wear quickly away each grace of youth, and each energy of manhood; but never but that once have I seen the pangs of the mind, in one single hour, change health, and vigour, and noble bearing to age, infirmity, and almost decrepitude. A murmur of astonishment and grief ran through the people, by whom he was much beloved. Casting himself recklessly in the chair, he turned to his secretary. "Call the witnesses," said he, "that the accused proposed to adduce.--This case is an obscure one.--Take their evidence--I am not capable." The clerk immediately desired me, in the name of the corregidor, to bring forward any persons who were likely to disprove the testimony against me. Father Francis was of course the first I called. He swore that I had left him, and entered my own chamber for the purpose of going to bed, at ten o'clock on the night of the murder. He farther said, that he had remained reading till one in the morning, and must have heard me if I had gone down the stairs--which, indeed, would have been the case if my step had been as heavy as it usually was. As to Houssaye, he swore through thick and thin, and, could he have known my wishes, would have witnessed anything I liked to dictate. In the first place, he declared he had undressed me, and seen me in bed. In the next, he vowed he had washed out several oil spots upon my doublet the day before: and in the third, that he lay with his door, at the top of the stairs, open all night; that he had never closed an eye till daybreak, and, finally, that I had certainly never passed that way. "I might have got out at the window, it was true," he observed; "but that, my window being forty feet from the street, it was not very probable I should have chosen such a means of descent." I need scarcely say, that though his deposition was assuredly a very splendid effort of genius, yet there was, nevertheless, not a word of truth in it. The next person I called was the landlady, who gave evidence that she found the door (which she had fastened the night before with various bolts, bars, and locks, which she described,) exactly in the same state as that in which she left it; and, in the end, availing herself of her privilege, she turned round, and abused my accuser with great volubility and effect.