control. I may have been wrong; but I
thought this a bad sign.

The case, as stated for the prosecution, told strongly against the
suspected men.

Ambrose and Silas Meadowcroft were charged with the murder of John Jago
(by means of the stick or by use of some other weapon), and with the
deliberate destruction of the body by throwing it into the quicklime.
In proof of this latter assertion, the knife which the deceased
habitually carried about him, and the metal buttons which were known to
belong to his coat, were produced. It was argued that these
indestructible substances, and some fragments of the larger bones had
alone escaped the action of the burning lime. Having produced medical
witnesses to support this theory by declaring the bones to be human,
and having thus circumstantially asserted the discovery of the remains
in the kiln, the prosecution next proceeded to prove that the missing
man had been murdered by the two brothers, and had been by them thrown
into the quicklime as a means of concealing their guilt.

Witness after witness deposed to the inveterate enmity against the
deceased displayed by Ambrose and Silas. The threatening language they
habitually used toward him; their violent quarrels with him, which had
become a public scandal throughout the neighborhood, and which had
ended (on one occasion at least) in a blow; the disgraceful scene which
had taken place under my window; and the restoration to Ambrose, on the
morning of the fatal quarrel, of the very stick which had been found
among the remains of the dead man--these facts and events, and a host
of minor circumstances besides, sworn to by witnesses whose credit was
unimpeachable, pointed with terrible directness to the conclusion at
which the prosecution had arrived.

I looked at the brothers as the weight of the evidence pressed more and
more heavily against them. To outward view at least, Ambrose still
maintained his self-possession. It was far otherwise with Silas. Abject
terror showed itself in his ghastly face; in his great knotty hands,
clinging convulsively to the bar at which he stood; in his staring
eyes, fixed in vacant horror on each witness who appeared. Public
feeling judged him on the spot. There he stood, self-betrayed already,
in the popular opinion, as a guilty man!

The one point gained in cross-examination by the defense related to the
charred bones.

Pressed on this point, a majority of the medical witnesses admitted
that