The appearance of his wife, who had a child in her arms, was scarcely less impressive, but not from any characteristic indicating the successful cunning displayed by the husband. She could scarcely contain herself. You saw the bloated virago always appearing from under a bunchy and soft mass, with small fiery eyes that peered about in every direction, as if she felt she had come there to favour the judges, who were bound accordingly to admire her. Like most of the famous examples of her sex renowned for cruelty, it was clear she could be as mild as gentleness itself; and it was only when she came to the great scene when she saw Burke lying on the body of his victim, and "flew out of the house" because of her delicacy, and stood in the passage "quite powerless," unable to "cry out," that you could come to form a true estimate of that combination of the devilish and the soft, which so much distinguishes the wicked of the one sex from those of the other. She admitted that she knew very well that Burke was murdering the woman, because she had seen "such tricks before;" yet she had "no power to remove herself from the passage;" and whenever the counsel or judge wished to know whether the victim screamed or shewed any indication of violent suffering, her mouth would give out nothing but soft words, so afraid was she to see anything "come upon the woman," all the while that the fiery scintillations escaped from these small eyes. To the next question, she admitted that she went for the tea-chest, trying to save herself by the qualification that Burke said it was to hold old shoes; and then, in a few minutes after, "she knew that the body was put into that box." Nor was the audience less struck with the manner in which she used the infant as an instrument to produce pity, and a mean of fence against searching questions. The poor creature was under the influence of hooping-cough, and as the long choking inspirations came every now and then ringing through the court, they reminded the audience of the strangling of the victims, and seemed to be intended by God as a mysterious kind of sign. She was not only a woman but a mother; and should not this produce sympathy even to one who had fought the fight of the drunken virago in the street of Portsburgh, been art-and-part in a dozen of murders, who had led the kind-hearted simpleton as a dumb lamb to the slaughter, and had so often watched under the hush of breathless expectation for the sign when the work was done, and then hung, like one of those fabled creatures called "Furies," round the slayers and the slain, to get her part of the prey?