Hanged he duly was, or, rather, he was hanged with more than usual expedition. Within less than a week of his doom being sealed by the High Court, a special meeting of the Cabinet was called, and his execution was fixed to take place in a fortnight. The Government, notwithstanding strong representations, supported by affidavits of new facts, declined to allow time for an appeal to the Privy Council. Ross went to the gallows. He was attended by his minister throughout, and he accepted the ministrations in the most worthy spirit. But he never wavered for a moment in his profession of innocence, either to his minister or to his solicitor. Standing on the scaffold, with the rope around his neck, he delivered a final protestation of his innocence in words which have rung through Australia. “~I am now face to face with my Maker~,” he said, “~and I swear by Almighty God that I am an innocent man. I never saw the child. I never committed the crime, and I don’t know who did it. I never confessed to anyone. I ask God to forgive those who swore my life away, and I pray God to have mercy on my poor, darling mother and my family.~” Some sticklers for accuracy, who have never made a public speech, and who, it may be hoped, will not have to make a start with a hangman’s rope around their neck, and the gallows for a platform, have fastened on to the words, “I never saw the girl,” as being the assertion of an untruth. Ross signed a statement that he saw a girl answering the description of Alma Tirtschke; he went into the witness box and swore that he had seen such a girl. The words, therefore, at the worst, could only mean, and could only be read by an intelligent man as meaning, that he had never spoken to the girl or seen her otherwise than as he had already said. He was not given much time for correction, or for second thoughts, because within a moment or two of uttering the words he had passed to eternity. But it is now known that Ross’s words were deliberately chosen, and that he meant to tell the world with his dying breath that he never, as far as he knew, set eyes on Alma Tirtschke. That being his intention, his actual words, it must be admitted, went too far, or not far enough, for from the description he gave of the girl, combined with the other facts, it appears certain that the girl he saw and described was Alma Tirtschke. But that he did not mean to recede from the position he had all along taken up seems so clear as to be beyond the realm of argument or the reach of adverse comment. ROSS AND HIS FAMILY.