both
Lindsay and his wife after the establishment of my innocence, and that
no persons would more sincerely rejoice in that event than they did. My
poor mother, whom my father had made aware of my situation soon after my
arrival, and who had borne the intelligence much better than we
expected, it put nearly distracted with joy.

"My puir laddie," she exclaimed, "I aye kent to be innocent. But noo the
world 'll ken it too, and I can die happy."

THE AMATEUR ROBBERY.

If there is anything more than another of which civilisation has reason
to be proud, it is the amelioration that has been effected in punishment
for crimes. Nor is it yet very long since we began to get quit of the
shame of our folly and inhumanity, if we have not traces of these yet,
coming out like sympathetic ink dried by the choler of self-perfection
and a false philosophy, as in such writings as the latter-day pamphlets.
How a man who loves his species, and has a heart, will hang his head
abashed as he turns his vision back no further than the sixteenth
century, and sees the writhing creatures--often aged unhappy
women--under the pilniewinkies, caschielaws, turkases, thumbikens, and
other instruments of torture, frantically bursting out with the demanded
confession that was to fit them for the stake or the rope! And even
after these things in the curiosity shop of Nemesis were got rid of, the
abettors of the law rushed with full swing into the operation of
hanging, scarcely allowing a crime to escape, from cold-blooded murder
down to the act of the famished wretch who snatched a roll from a
baker's basket. However insensible these strange lawgivers may have been
to so much cruelty, however blind to the perversity, prejudices, and
weaknesses incident to human testimony, however ignorant of the total
inefficacy of their remedy to deter from crime, one might have imagined
that they could not but have known, if they ever looked inwardly into
their own hearts, how obscure are human motives, and especially those
that instigate to breaches of the law; and yet their consistent rule
was, to make the _corpus delicti_ prove the intention. These
considerations have been suggested to me by the recollection of a wild
adventure of some young men in Edinburgh, the circumstances of which,
not belonging to fiction, will show better than a learned dissertation
how easy it was for these Dracos to catch the fact and miss the motive.

The skeleton names--now, al