-examination. The very reluctance with which Dr. Keep
gave his fatal evidence, and the support given to his conclusions
by distinguished testimony told strongly in favour of the absolute
trustworthiness of his statements. The evidence called to prove that
the murdered man had been seen alive late on Friday afternoon was highly
inconclusive.

Contrary to the advice of his counsel, Webster addressed the jury
himself. He complained of the conduct of his case, and enumerated
various points that his counsel had omitted to make, which he conceived
to be in his favour. The value of his statements may be judged by the
fact that he called God to witness that he had not written any one of
the anonymous letters, purporting to give a true account of the doctor's
fate, which had been received by the police at the time of Parkman's
disappearance. After his condemnation Webster confessed to the
authorship of at least one of them.

The jury retired at eight o'clock on the eleventh day of the trial. They
would seem to have approached their duty in a most solemn and devout
spirit, and it was with the greatest reluctance and after some searching
of heart that they brought themselves to find the prisoner guilty of
wilful murder. On hearing their verdict, the Professor sank into a seat,
and, dropping his head, rubbed his eyes behind his spectacles as if
wiping away tears. On the following morning the Chief Justice sentenced
him to death after a well-meaning speech of quite unnecessary length and
elaboration, at the conclusion of which the condemned man wept freely.

A petition for a writ of error having been dismissed, the Professor in
July addressed a petition for clemency to the Council of the State. Dr.
Putnam, who had been attending Webster in the jail, read to the Council
a confession which he had persuaded the prisoner to make. According to
this statement Webster had, on the Friday afternoon, struck Parkman on
the head with a heavy wooden stick in a wild moment of rage, induced by
the violent taunts and threats of his creditor. Appalled by his deed,
he had in panic locked himself in his room, and proceeded with desperate
haste to dismember the body; he had placed it for that purpose in the
sink in his back room, through which was running a constant stream of
water that carried away the blood. Some portions of the body he had
burnt in the furnace; those in the lavatory and the tea-chest he had
concealed there, until he should have ha