Mr. SERJEANT HAYWARD--May it please your lordships and you gentlemen of the jury, I likewise am appointed to assist the Crown on this occasion, but His Majesty's learned counsel having laid before you so faithful a narrative of this dismal transaction, it seems almost unnecessary for me to take up any more of your time in repeating anything that has been before said; and, indeed, my own inclinations would lead me to cast a veil over the guilty scene--a scene so black and so horrid that if my duty did not call me to it I could rather wish it might be for ever concealed from human eyes. But as we are now making inquisition for blood it is absolutely necessary for me to make some observations upon that chain of circumstances that attended this bloody contrivance and detested murder. [Illustration: Captain Cranstoun and Miss Blandy (_From an Engraving in the British Museum_.)] Experience has taught us that in many cases a single fact may be supported by false testimony, but where it is attended with a train of circumstances that cannot be invented (had they never happened), such a fact will always be made out to the satisfaction of a jury by the concurring assistance of circumstantial evidence. Because circumstances that tally one with another are above human contrivance. And especially such as naturally arise in their order from the first contrivance of a scheme to the fatal execution of it. Having suggested this much, I shall now proceed to lay before you those sort of circumstances that seem to me to arise through this whole affair, and leave it to your judgment whether they do not amount to too convincing a proof that the prisoner at the bar has knowingly been the cause of her own father's death, for upon the prisoner's knowledge of what she did will depend her fate. Of all kinds of murders that by poison is the most dreadful, as it takes a man unguarded, and gives him no opportunity to defend himself, much more so when administered by the hand of a child, whom one could least suspect, and from whom one might naturally look for assistance and comfort. Could a father entertain any suspicion of a child to whom, under God, he had been the second cause of life? No, sure, and yet this is the case now before you. The unfortunate deceased has received his death by poison, and that undoubtedly administered by the hand of his own--his only--his beloved child. Spare me, gentlemen, to pay the tribute of one tear to the memory of a person with whom I was most intimately acquainted, and to the excellency of whose disposition and integrity of heart I can safely bear faithful testimony. Oh! were he now living, and to see his daughter there, the severest tortures that poison could give would be nothing to what he would suffer from such a sight.