The case was opened, the indictment read, and Mr. Serjeant Giffard rose. He called first witnesses to show that there had been a considerable and, as he termed it, a bitter feud betwixt the prisoner and Mr. Drury; he proved the unguarded expressions of Mr. Woodburn in the hay-field, and that the prisoner was the last man seen coming from the ferry where Mr. Drury was found, as he said, in his blood. In his address, which followed, he dwelt on these proofs of an animus in Mr. Woodburn’s mind against Mr. Drury, and treated his words only four days before the catastrophe as words of menace, or at least of a wish to have Mr. Drury put away. The catastrophe following on the immediate heels of these words, what could it be deemed but the direct result of them? Then the fact that no amount of inquiry, nor the offered reward of 300_l._, had been able to elicit a single atom of evidence implicating any other person, must be held, in his opinion, as most decisive. Why had no such evidence transpired? The answer in his own mind, said the counsel, was that no such evidence existed; and that the fair and damning inference was that the man, who was known to have a standing feud with the murdered man; who had uttered words of a vindictive and even minatory character; the man who was last seen coming from the fatal spot, and that only just before the discovery of the horrible circumstance, was the person guilty of that deadly crime. He had wished the country might be fortunately rid of the person so offensive to him, and there was the finale. He dwelt especially on the fact, that no robbery had been committed; it was clearly a case of vengeance in a mind where money offered no temptation.