It is very probable that if that poor woman of the city, who was a sinner, who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears, had been called a few weeks later into a Court of Law in Jerusalem, and been placed for one long day and-a-half face to face with a sharp and clever Attorney-General, to answer concerning her past life, she also might have stumbled and wavered, in order to save other poor sinners like herself, whom she would have necessarily involved in any full revelation of her past. And yet all the time she loved God; and her sins, which were many, were forgiven her. I shall give a brief sketch of the life of REBECCA JARRETT, without entering into the details of its darkest incidents, which have been already sufficiently dragged to light at the Old Bailey. I think that, after reading it, any impartial person, knowing anything of our poor human nature, will say that, if she misled Mr. Stead, as the verdict of the Jury declares, she did not mislead him intentionally. She was put in an exceptionally difficult position for a person of her poor education and miserable antecedents. Her head ached and her brain reeled under those long hours of cross-examination, and her memory (never a good one) often failed her; but I, who knew her most intimately, here record my profound and unshaken conviction that throughout her heart was true—true to the cause which she had learned to love as we do—true to me, and true to Mr. Stead, whom she had heartily desired to help in the work which she had learned to see to be necessary. The public has not had a fair chance of judging of the whole case, the newspaper reports having been imperfect, and in many cases one-sided. It is no pleasure to me or to my fellow-workers to speak ill of Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Broughton; but in justice to Rebecca, the extraordinary nature of their evidence ought to be recalled. Mrs. Armstrong stated, under cross-examination, “If I said that, then, at Bow Street, I told a lie.”[1] She accused her little daughter of having told a lie; she accused Mrs. Broughton of having told a lie. Footnote 1: With regard to failure of memory, it will be remembered that the newspaper reports stated that Mrs. Armstrong, when under cross-examination, contradicted her own previous evidence six times, besides contradicting her husband, her daughter, and Jane Farrer. Mr. Stead cross-examined Mrs. Armstrong somewhat closely as to what specific statements, or allusions, or clue of any kind, there were in the “Lily” paragraph of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ article, which first kindled her suspicions, and led her to conclude that her child was the victim referred to. Stead’s avowed object in this was to show the Jury that unless Armstrong had really sold her child, and had therefore _a guilty conscience_, it was strange for her to alight on the “Lily” paragraph as referring to herself and her daughter.