The circumstantial evidence against Forster was conclusive. The blood-stained great-coat, the possession of Baumler’s property and clothes, and his presence at the scene of the crime were significant facts. The accused felt that all this surely tended to convict him, but he thought out a line of defence in the quiet of his prison cell. He sought to throw the blame upon others. He invented two persons, relatives of the murdered Baumler, who, he said, invited him, Forster, to go with them to Nürnberg where they promised him work, and from them he got, as a gift, the incriminating clothes. This fictitious story could not be sustained. The two relations did not exist and they had had no dealing, as pretended, with Forster. The whole defence was a failure, but not the less did the accused persist in his denials of guilt and fight strenuously with the examining judge. He was questioned on thirteen separate occasions and replied to thirteen hundred questions, after being confronted with innumerable victims. No confession could be wrung from him, and without it no sentence of capital punishment was admissible in the Bavarian courts. He held out obstinately to the last, under a well assumed cloak of calmness, gentleness and piety, as if submitting passively to a fate he did not deserve. He must have seen toward the end of his trial that the truth could not be overcome by his fables and cunning evasions, but he remained unmoved and, as his reward, escaped with his life. The sentence passed upon him was perpetual imprisonment in chains and it was endured in the fortress of Lichtenau in Hesse-Cassel. His behaviour in gaol was in keeping with his dogged, unemotional character. He bore his heavy punishment in impenetrable silence for years. His unbending obstinacy of demeanour was partly due to his callous, apathetic temperament, his unyielding power of physical endurance and his exalted personal pride. He liked to think that by stolid endurance he was proving his heroism. He boasted of his unbroken steadfastness of purpose, “Believe me,” he told a fellow prisoner, “I shall never confess; I shall resist all persuasion to do so until my last dying breath. I never gave way all my life in anything I undertook. I hug my chains.” He did so, literally, treating them as a badge of honour, a tribute to his constancy, and set himself in his leisure hours to polish them till they shone like silver. He delighted in the manifest admiration of his fellows, and at one time conversed with them freely, giving picturesque descriptions of his adventurous career and enlarging with evident pleasure on the details of his principal crime. He was often sullen and insubordinate and would do no work; no punishment would compel him or break his spirit; when they flogged him, he offered his back to the lash with the utmost indifference, taking the strokes without moving a muscle or uttering a sound, calmly protesting that they might do what they liked with his