I do not scruple to say that I never read anything so infamous as this great lawyer’s speech. He was not ashamed to declare, at starting, that he firmly believed the prisoner to be guilty. What right had he to say anything of the sort? Was it for _him_ to decide? Was he the Judge and Jury both, I should like to know? Having begun by condemning the prisoner on his own authority, the Lord Advocate proceeded to pervert the most innocent actions of that unhappy man so as to give them as vile an aspect as possible. Thus: When Eustace kissed his poor wife’s forehead on her death-bed, he did it to create a favorable impression in the minds of the doctor and the nurse! Again, when his grief under his bereavement completely overwhelmed him, he was triumphing in secret, and acting a part! If you looked into his heart, you would see there a diabolical hatred for his wife and an infatuated passion for Mrs. Beauly! In everything he had said he had lied; in everything he had done he had acted like a crafty and heartless wretch! So the chief counsel for the prosecution spoke of the prisoner, standing helpless before him at the Bar. In my husband’s place, if I could have done nothing more, I would have thrown something at his head. As it was, I tore the pages which contained the speech for the prosecution out of the Report and trampled them under my feet--and felt all the better too for having done it. At the same time I feel a little ashamed of having revenged myself on the harmless printed leaves now. The fifth day of the Trial opened with the speech for the defense. Ah, what a contrast to the infamies uttered by the Lord Advocate was the grand burst of eloquence by the Dean of Faculty, speaking on my husband’s side! This illustrious lawyer struck the right note at starting. “I yield to no one,” he began, “in the pity I feel for the wife. But I say, the martyr in this case, from first to last, is the husband. Whatever the poor woman may have endured, that unhappy man at the Bar has suffered, and is now suffering, more. If he had not been the kindest of men, the most docile and most devoted of husbands, he would never have occupied his present dreadful situation. A man of a meaner and harder nature would have felt suspicions of his wife’s motives when she asked him to buy poison--would have seen through the wretchedly commonplace excuses she made for wanting it--and would have wisely and cruelly said, ‘No.’ The prisoner is not that sort of man. He is too good to his wife, too innocent of any evil thought toward her, or toward any one, to foresee the inconveniences and the dangers to which his fatal compliance may expose him. And what is the result? He stands there, branded as a murderer, because he was too high-minded and too honorable to suspect his wife.” Speaking thus of the husband, the Dean was just as eloquent and just as unanswerable when he came to speak of the wife.