The prisoner, meanwhile, was sitting calm but vigilant, pen in hand. His face, square and strong, with firmly marked mouth and chin, showed no sign of emotion, but under their heavy brows his black eyes played uneasily between the Court and jury. Evidently not more than thirty years of age, his attitude and expression showed intelligence and alert capacity. "Go on, Mr. District Attorney," again admonished the Judge; and Dockbridge, pulling himself together, commenced to examine the complainant. The prisoner was now straining eye and ear to catch every look and word from the witness-stand. Hardly had the complainant opened his mouth before the defendant had objected to the answer, the objection had been sustained, and the reply stricken out. He continued to object from time to time, and his points were so well taken that he dominated not only the examination but the witness as well, and the jury presently found themselves listening to a cross-examination as skilfully conducted as if by a trained practitioner. But, although the defendant showed himself a better lawyer than his adversary, it was apparent that his battle was a losing one. Point after point he contested stubbornly, yet the case loomed clear against him. The People having "rested," the defendant announced that he had no witnesses, and would go to the jury on the evidence, or, rather "failure of evidence," as he put it, of the prosecution. It was done with great adroitness, and none of the jury perceived that, by refusing to accept counsel, he had made it impossible to take the stand in his own behalf, and had thus escaped the necessity of subjecting himself to cross-examination as to his past career. If the spectators had expected a piteous appeal for mercy or a burst of prison rhetoric, they were disappointed. The prisoner summed his case up carefully, arguing that there was a reasonable doubt upon the evidence to which he was entitled; begged the jury not to condemn him merely because he appeared before them as one charged with a crime; appealed to them for justice; and at the close, for the first time forgetting the proprieties of the situation, exclaimed, "I did not do it, gentlemen! I did not do it! There is an absolute failure of proof! You cannot find that I took the purse from the old gentleman on such evidence! It is all a lie!" It was his one false touch. To raise the issue of veracity is usually a mistake on the part of a defendant, and the defiant look in Graham's eyes might well have suggested conscious guilt. As he paused for a moment after this concluding sentence, an Italian band came marching down Centre Street playing the dead march. Some patriot was being borne to his last sleep in an alien land. Outside the court-house it paused for a moment with one melancholy crash of funeral chords. It seemed a vibrant echo of the discord of his own fruitless life. At the same moment a ray from the red sun setting over the Tombs fell upon the prisoner's face.