"When a prisoner pleads Guilty," he said, "it is usual for the Court to proceed at once to the sentence. But in the present unhappy case it has been thought right that the Judge, in directing the Jury to find a formal verdict, should indicate the grounds on which the Court has based its judgment. "The prisoner has pleaded guilty to taking the life of her new-born child. She has confessed that down to the hour of its birth she had the deliberate intention of making away with it, and the Court is unhappily compelled to find in her conduct only too many evidences of that design. "But she has also said that after her child's birth, under the divine love and compassion of awakened motherhood, she repented of her intention of killing it, and that it came to its death by accident--the accident of semi-consciousness and the consequences of her fear. The Court would gladly accept this explanation if it could be corroborated by the evidence. Unfortunately it cannot. On the contrary the prisoner's subsequent behaviour points to an entirely different conclusion. Therefore the Court has nothing before it but the prisoner's confession that she intended to take the life of her child, and the fact that she did indeed take it." The Deemster paused (Gell had risen and was seen crushing his way out of Court); then he continued, "How her child came by its death is between God and her conscience. It is not for me, or perhaps for any man, to read the secret of a woman's heart in the dark hour of the birth of her misbegotten child. Into the cloud of that mystery only the eye of Heaven can follow her. But I should fail in my duty as a Judge if I did not try to show that the Court is fully conscious of the physical weaknesses and spiritual temptations which lie in the way of a woman who is in the position of the accused." Then followed, during some breathless moments, such speaking as nobody present had ever heard before except from Stowell himself, and only from him on the day when he snatched from the gallows the rag of a woman who had killed her husband. It was a contrast of the conditions attending the birth of a child born in wedlock, and of a child born illegitimate. They all knew the first. The beloved young wife watching with a thrilling heart for the signs of that coming event which was to complete her joy; the happy months in which she is shielded from all harm; the tender solicitude of her husband; her own sweet and secret preparations for the little stranger who is to come; the guesses as to its sex; the discussions as to its name--until at length, in the fulness of its appointed time, the child born in wedlock comes, like an angel floating out of the sunrise, into a world that is waiting for it to take it into its arms.