“Never mind what they _tell_ you, Mr. Burton”—observed the judge—“testify only to what you _know_.” “Did you see this strange woman at the fire, or after the fire?” continued Dunscomb. “I can’t say that I did. I remember to have looked round for her, too; but I did not find her.” “Was her absence spoken of in the crowd at the time?” “Something was said about it; but we were too much taken up with the old couple to think a great deal of this stranger.” This is an outline of Burton’s testimony; though the cross-examination was continued for more than an hour, and Williams had him again examined in chief. That intrepid practitioner contended that the defence had made Burton its own witness in all that related to the measurement of the skeletons; and that he had a right to a cross-examination. After all this contest, the only fact of any moment elicited from the witness related to the difference in stature between Goodwin and his wife, as has been stated already. In the mean time, Timms ascertained that the last report set on foot by his own agents, at the suggestion of Mary Monson herself, was circulating freely; and, though it was directly opposed to the preceding rumour, which had found great favour with the gossips, this extravagant tale was most greedily swallowed. We conceive that those persons who are so constituted, morally, as to find pleasure in listening to the idle rumours that float about society, are objects of pity; their morbid desire to talk of the affairs of others being a disease that presses them down beneath the level they might otherwise occupy. With such persons, the probabilities go for nothing; and they are more inclined to give credit to a report that excites their interest, by running counter to all the known laws of human actions, than to give faith to its contradiction, when sustained by every reason that experience sustains. Thus was it on the present occasion. There was something so audacious in the rumour that Mary Monson belonged to a gang of rogues in town, and had been sent especially to rob the Goodwins, that vulgar curiosity found great delight in it; the individual who heard the report usually sending it on with additions of his own, that had their authority purely in the workings of a dull imagination. It is in that way that this great faculty of the mind is made to perform a double duty; which in the one case is as pure and ennobling, as in the other it is debasing and ignoble. The man of a rich imagination, he who is capable of throwing the charms of poetical feeling around the world in which we dwell, is commonly a man of truth. The high faculty which he possesses seems, in such cases, to be employed in ferreting out facts which, on proper occasions, he produces distinctly, manfully, and logically. On the other hand, there is a species of subordinate imagination that is utterly incapable of embellishing life with charms of any sort, and which delights in the false.