The surprise of the day was the speech of the attorney-general. It opened simply enough. He sought to show that it was impossible for Tad to be alive. The poor boy was doubtless at the bottom of the river. How could it be otherwise? Assume, as his learned opponent would have them believe, that he had swum ashore. Where was he now? The suggestion that he was in the custody of some enemy of the prisoner, who sought by concealing him to effect the incarceration of Reuben Lorey in the penitentiary for a long term, was so absurd that he hesitated to argue such a foolish position before so intelligent a body of men as the jury whom he had the pleasure of addressing. Who would, for revenge, encounter the hazards of such a scheme? The boy was as well known throughout the section as Piomingo Bald. Any chance glimpse of him by a casual visitor would fling the conspirators themselves into the clutches of the law, that would be loath to lightly loose its hold on such rascals. Who would voluntarily burden themselves with the support of an idiot? If anybody had found Tad, he would have been mighty quick to carry the boy back to old man Griff. Say that no one had detained him,—what then? He was an idiot, incapable of taking care of himself. If he were wandering at large, starving, half clad, would not some one have seen him besides Alethea Sayles, in all these weeks, gentlemen, in all these months? It was a remarkable story that the witness had told,—a remarkable story. (The counsel seemed to find fit expression of his sense of its solemnity by sinking his basso profundo to a thunderous mutter.) No one for a moment could doubt the sanity of that witness. She was evidently a girl of fine common sense; an excellent girl, too,—no one could for a moment doubt the truth of any word she uttered. The fact was, Alethea Sayles saw a strange thing that night. She thought she saw Tad. It was only his image, not himself. “The forlorn boy is dead, gentlemen,” he continued. “She saw the fantasy of her own anxious, overwrought brain. He was in her mind. She had pondered long upon him, and upon the plight of her lover, who had killed him. What wonder, then, that in the mist, and the flickering moonlight, and the lonely midnight, she should fancy that she saw him!” He told the gaping and amazed jury that this was not an isolated instance. He mentioned other victims of hallucination; he detailed the strange experiences of Nicolai, of Spinoza, of Dr. Bostock, of Lord Londonderry, of Baron de Géramb, of Leuret, of Lord Brougham. Harshaw, who had sat listening, with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed, a smile of ostentatious derision upon his face, grew grave upon the mention of the last name. He had never heard of the others, but to attempt to bolster a theory of spectral apparition by this name, revered in the profession, was, he felt, a juridical sacrilege that should cause the attorney-general to be at the very least stricken from the rolls.