Had I been one of the crowd who listened, I should have believed myself guilty. The evidence against me, as he set it forth, seemed a web closely woven enough to hold anything. I had been seen by two or more people engaged in a quarrel with the deceased in the Basso Porto. I had been seen on the Chiaja with him at a time when he was the worse for drink, and when my conduct and appearance were so suspicious that a perfect stranger was impelled to watch me for two hours lest I should do the man a mischief in his drunken sleep. Two or three hours later, this perfect stranger to us both had found the dead body of Charles Grammont in the road with all the pockets of his garments turned inside out, and had put the body into a cart he was then driving from Posilipo to Naples. A hundred yards nearer the city he found me lying bruised as if in a struggle, and with the marks of a hand wet with blood upon my white shirt-front. The marks of the hand had been found to correspond in size with the hand of the deceased. My companion in the dock was probably, so the accusatore said, an accessory before the fact, and it was probable that, whilst I had committed the crime to gratify my own evil passion for revenge, I had engaged this desperate and notorious character to pillage the body in order to give the murder the appearance of having been committed from a purely sordid motive. He set forth all his facts and all his theories about them with great calmness, but when he came to the close of his indictment he burst into an impassioned protest against certain articles which had appeared in a French journal on the question of Italian Brigandage, citing this case as an argument to show that crimes of violence were committed by born Neapolitans within the city radius, and expressing a sarcastic wonder that the authorities should have troubled themselves to arrest the criminals though the proofs against them both were overwhelming. 'Thus it is,' said the accusatore, speaking with a stern passion of emphasis, 'that these traitors to their country first cast off their natal ties in order to lead lives of unrestricted profligacy abroad, and having, in other lands, done all within them to disgrace the land of their birth, return to it to inflict a wound still deeper upon the national reputation; and thus it is that these villains, though they once did their country the honour to repudiate it, return to lay a final disgrace upon it.'