The court was crowded to suffocation; many ladies looked down upon the crowd in the place set apart for them. A hum was heard like that in a theatre before the curtain rises, followed by a painful silence when the prisoner entered and took his place behind the barrier. Buschoff was a man of fifty, strongly built and of medium height. He sat with downcast eyes, his hands trembling; his colour was so ruddy that, but for the signs of inward agitation expressed in his face, it would not have been easy to suppose that he had spent a long time in prison awaiting trial. The case lasted ten days and many witnesses were called, but no evidence was adduced incriminating Buschoff, who, when interrogated, steadfastly denied his guilt. A professor of Semitic lore and an expert in interpreting the Talmud, was asked if murders in the cause of ritual were anywhere justified in the Talmud. This he denied, and other witnesses testified that Buschoff belonged to the order of priests commonly called Levites, who are not allowed to approach a corpse except those of their parents or brethren. On the sixth day, a bag belonging to Buschoff, apparently blood-stained, was examined, but it could not be proved to be human blood. On the seventh day, the chief interest was centred in the evidence of the provincial judge, Brixius, who had examined Buschoff at the time of his first arrest. The result was, upon the whole, favourable to the accused, as Brixius considered many of the statements which had been made by witnesses the result of heated fancy and unbridled imagination dictated by hatred of the Jews. On the last day of the trial, Frau Buschoff, who had not as yet been called, had to appear. The accused wept bitterly at the sight of his wife. She corroborated the testimony which had been given by her husband and daughter. The jury was then asked to decide whether “the accused Adolf Buschoff were guilty of having deliberately murdered Johann Hegemann in Xanten on the 29th June, 1891.” A speech for the defence then followed, which lasted two hours, and in the afternoon a second counsel spoke for the prisoner, setting forth the innocence of the accused and appealing to the jury to acquit him. Then followed the judge’s summing up, which was absolutely fair and impartial. He called attention to the fact that the population of Germany was divided between friends and foes of the Jews. “Before the court of justice, however,” he said, “all men are equal. A judge’s task is not to inquire to what religion an accused belongs; he must have no partisan feeling.” The jury was absent for only half an hour, and returned with the verdict of “not guilty,” which was received with storms of applause. So ended a trial which produced an immense sensation, not only in the Rhine provinces but to the furthest confines of Germany, and was followed with strained and feverish attention.