ontented. Had all things been as they should be, the Secretary of State
would have had no duty at all in the matter. It was in this frame of
mind that Judge Bramber applied himself to the consideration of the
case. No juster man ever lived;--and yet in his mind there was a bias
against the prisoner.

Nevertheless he went to his work with great patience, and a resolve to
sift everything that was to be sifted. The Secretary of State had done
no more than his required duty in sending the case to him, and he would
now do his. He took the counter-evidence as it came in the papers. In
order that the two Bagwaxian theories, each founded on the same small
document, might be expounded, one consecutively after the other, Dick
Shand and his deposition were produced first. The judge declared to
himself that Dick's single oath, which could not now be tested by
cross-examination, amounted to nothing. He had been a drunkard and a
pauper,--had descended to the lowest occupation which the country
afforded, and had more than once nearly died from delirium tremens. He
had then come home penniless, and had--produced his story. If such
evidence could avail to rescue a prisoner from his sentence, and to
upset a verdict, what verdict or what sentence could stand? Poor Dick's
sworn testimony, in Judge Bramber's mind, told rather against Caldigate
than for him.

Then came the postmarks,--as to which the Bagwaxian theory was quite
distinct from that as to the postage-stamp. Here the judge found the
facts to be somewhat complicated and mazy. It was long before he could
understand the full purport of the argument used, and even at last he
hardly understood the whole of it. But he could see nothing in it to
justify him in upsetting the verdict;--nothing even to convince him that
the envelope had been fraudulently handled. There was no evidence that
such a dated stamp had not been in use at Sydney on the day named.
Copies from the records kept daily at Sydney,--photographed
copies,--should have been submitted before that argument had been used.

But when it came to the postage-stamp, then he told himself very quickly
that the envelope had been fraudulently handled. The evidence as to the
date of the manufacture of the stamp was conclusive. It could not have
served to pay the postage on a letter from Sydney to Nobble in May 1873,
seeing that it had not then been in existence. And thus any necessity
there might otherwise have been for further inquir