ond any doubt that Mrs. Parker was the forger of the checks in
the possession of the District Attorney, and of many others beside, some
of them for very large amounts. The evidence of Sweeney was of itself
quite sufficient to warrant a conviction. To make assurance doubly sure,
however, the District Attorney upon the second trial moved a new
indictment, setting forth as the forgery a check signed "E. Bierstadt,"
so that when Parker took the stand, as he had done in the former trial
and testified that he was the forger, he found himself unable to write
this new signature, and hence his testimony went for nothing.

But even the testimony of Sweeney was that of an accomplice, requiring
corroboration, while that of Peabody remained the evidence of "a mere
policeman," eager to convict the defendant and "add another scalp to his
official belt." With an extraordinary accumulation of evidence the case
hinged on the veracity of these two men, to which was opposed the denial
of the defendant and her husband. It is an interesting fact that in the
final analysis of the case the jury were compelled to determine the
issue by evidence entirely documentary in character. It is also an
illustration of what tiny facts stamp whole masses of testimony as true
or false.

On her examination Mrs. Parker had sworn among other things: (1) That
she had no knowledge of the envelope, the back of which had been used by
Parker for the purpose of directing Rogers, Peet & Co. to deliver the
clothes and money to his messenger--and, of course, that the words "Mr.
Geo. B. Lang" were not in her handwriting. This was one of the envelopes
claimed by the prosecution to have been originally addressed in pencil
and sent to themselves by the Parkers through the mail for this precise
purpose. (2) That she had never seen the "Kauser practice sheets," and
that the words "Alice Kauser," repeated hundreds of times thereon, were
not in her handwriting. For some reason unknown to the District
Attorney, however, she admitted having written the words "I am upstairs
in the bath-room" upon a similar sheet, but claimed that at the time
this was done the reverse of the paper was entirely blank.

Microscopic examination showed that among the words "Alice" and "Kauser"
on the practice sheets some one had written a capital "M." One of the
legs of the "M" crossed and was superimposed upon a letter in the word
"Alice." Hence, whoever wrote the "M" knew what was on the practice