The jury was impanelled; the indictment read; and the prisoner pleaded “not guilty,” putting himself, in the words of the law, “upon God and his country.” The attorney general then arose and opened his case; and rarely have I listened to a more artful address. The history of the prisoner’s love, his marriage with the daughter of the deceased, the separation which had ever since existed betwixt the families, and the natural irritation which the accused must have felt toward the murdered man, and which might have led to the sudden sacrifice of his life in a moment of passion, even without any premeditated design against him, were all worked up with such consummate skill, that, when the evidence came to be detailed, the jury looked knowingly at each other, as if satisfied that the prisoner was the only person who could have been guilty of the murder. Indeed, the circumstances were unanswerable. Look at them. Here is a man wronged, deeply wronged by the deceased—that man is stung to madness by the horrors of approaching starvation—he leaves his house, at the dead of night and does not return until morning, and he brings with him on his return a purse which is subsequently identified as having been in the possession of the murdered man. Nor is this all. The murderer obviously committed the crime under a sudden impulse, for on recognising the deceased he made a passionate exclamation, and discharged his pistol. After the deed, he, as well as his companions, terrified at what had been done, fled in dismay. They are tracked until one of their number left them, and the footsteps of that one led to Stanhope’s door. What could be more conclusive? Such was the substance of the argument against the prisoner, an argument so compact, candid, and devoid of declamation as to be irresistibly convincing; and when it was finished I trembled—and not without cause—for the life of the accused. The evidence was the same as that upon the examination prior to the commitment of the prisoner. There was no discrepancy in the statements of the witnesses. All was clear, truth-like, and irresistible. Even the talents of my colleague failed to elicit any thing material on the cross-examination, although he subjected the witnesses severally to as severe a scrutiny as I ever saw exercised. The man especially who testified to having examined the tracks of the robbers in the snow underwent the most searching probing. The efforts of the defence were directed to establish the possibility that there might have been three fugitives on the first track even after the separation—in short, to overthrow the view taken by the prosecution that the robbers separated at this point. “Did you,” said my colleague, “inspect the tracks of the larger body of fugitives after the supposed defection of one of their number?” The man answered in the affirmative, and said that he was certain there could not have been more than two, by the number of foot-marks. “How far did you follow the tracks?”