all the judges, Pratt, Powys, and Fortescue Aland, declared all the objections groundless; but a world of words was wasted before Layer could be brought to plead. Ultimately he pleaded _Not Guilty_, and he was ordered back to the Tower. He asked earnestly to be allowed to have there the comfort of the company of his wife and sister. In his hour of great peril, he thought of his two best, truest, and wisest friends. Pratt sanctioned the companionship of the wife alone. Layer urged that she would be subject to humiliating search on the part of rude warders every time she passed to or fro; but that when there were two women, one might save the other from gross insult. ‘No, no!’ said the Chief Justice, ‘we must not be too forward in allowing women to go there. We all remember how an escape from the Tower was managed by women going thither.’ [Sidenote: _THE TRIAL._] The trial was opened on the 21st of November. Layer stumbled forward to his place, still weighed down by irons. Pratt, at the sight, exclaimed, as if the matter occurred to him for the first time, ‘I will not stir till the prisoner’s irons are taken off;’――accordingly they fell; and the next scene in the drama was the calling and challenging the jury. Layer recognised some of them who had said they would hang him if they were on the panel, and his ‘challenge for cause’ was allowed. His right to peremptory challenge was also unquestioned, but almost invariably when Layer accepted the juror, by remaining silent at the calling of the name, the Attorney-General struck in with the cry: ‘I challenge him for the king,’ and the possible Tory or Jacobite was set aside. ◆[Sidenote: _A FALSE WITNESS._]◆ Every avenue of escape was as carefully closed by the Whig lawyers. The junior counsel, in opening the case, asked how the jury could find a man not guilty who had fled from justice as soon as he was accused. The jury were told, moreover, that even if it were possible they could not convict him, they would have ‘to enquire of his goods and chattels;’ thus forfeiture of estate seems to have followed the mere charge of high treason! Layer was charged with every possible sort of treason, but the heaviest and highest included all the rest,――regicide, or what Layer’s Jacobite friends called ‘securing the person of King George in safety from the mob.’ Wearg did not go into detail with much bitterness, and the Attorney-General, who followed, confined himself to a renewal of circumstances already detailed. He then called Stephen Lynch, and a very accomplished villain stept into the box with ostentatious alacrity. He was objected to by Layer as a man who had confessed to treason, and who was about to give evidence which had already bought for him a promise of pardon. This was pooh-poohed by one of the judges. Lynch, he remarked, might speak the truth under that promise; and suppose he did not, he could not be questioned on it. Lynch’s evidence showed one side of Jacobite hireling life. He (a