Moorside. It was proved that he had been drinking with some dissolute persons--poachers and the like--in a public-house in a neighbouring parish all Saturday, till well on in the afternoon, when he left them in a state of intoxication--and was then seen running along the hill-side in the direction of the moor. Where he passed the night between the Saturday and the Sabbath, he could give no account, except once when unasked, and as if speaking to himself, he was overheard by the jailor to mutter, "Oh! that fatal night--that fatal night!" And then, when suddenly interrogated, "Where were you?" he answered, "Asleep on the hill;" and immediately relapsed into a state of mental abstraction. These were the chief circumstances against him, which his counsel had striven to explain away. That most eloquent person dwelt with affecting earnestness on the wickedness of putting any evil construction on the distracted behaviour of the wretched man when brought without warning upon the sudden sight of the mangled corpse of the beautiful girl, whom all allowed he had most passionately and tenderly loved; and he strove to prove--as he did prove to the conviction of many--that such behaviour was incompatible with such guilt, and almost of itself established his innocence. All that was sworn to _against_ him, as having passed in that dreadful room, was in truth _for_ him--unless all our knowledge of the best and of the worst of human nature were not, as folly, to be given to the winds. He beseeched the jury, therefore, to look at all the other circumstances that did indeed seem to bear hard upon the prisoner, in the light of his innocence, and not of his guilt, and that they would all fade into nothing. What mattered his possession of the watch and other trinkets? Lovers as they were, might not the unhappy girl have given them to him for temporary keepsakes? Or might he not have taken them from her in some playful mood, or received them--(and the brooch was cracked, and the mainspring of the watch broken, though the glass was whole)--to get them repaired in the town, which he often visited, and she never? Could human credulity for one moment believe, that such a man as the prisoner at the bar had been sworn to be by a host of witnesses--and especially by that witness, who, with such overwhelming solemnity, had declared he loved him as his own son, and would have been proud if Heaven had given him such a son--he who had baptised him, and known him well ever since a child--that such a man could _rob_ the body of her whom he had violated and murdered? If, under the instigation of the devil, he had violated and murdered her, and for a moment were made the hideous supposition, did vast hell hold that demon whose voice would have tempted the violator and murderer--suppose him both--yea, that man at the bar--sworn to by all the parish, if need were, as a man of tenderest charities, and generosity unbounded--in the lust of lucre,