en at the page where Mr. Prentiss had
marked the law," said Rowan: "he requires no aid from me, brother
Hardin. With all your learning and experience, he is more than a match
for you."

This Hardin was not long in discovering, and especially did he feel it
when Prentiss came to reply to his address to the jury. So long
accustomed to defy competition as a criminal lawyer, Hardin was not
only surprised at the tact and masterly talent displayed by his
adversary, but he was annoyed, and felt that to maintain his prestige
as the great criminal lawyer of Kentucky, he must put forth all his
powers. He had done so; and in his summing up before the jury he seemed
more than himself. When he had concluded there were many who deemed
conviction sure.

Prentiss followed, and in his grandest manner tore to tatters every
argument and every position advanced and assumed by Hardin. Towering in
the majesty of his genius in one of those transcendent flights of
imagination so peculiar to him, when his illustrations in figures
followed each other in such quick and constant succession as to seem
inexhaustible, he turned suddenly upon Hardin, and, stooping his face
until it almost touched that of the stern old Kentuckian, he hissed
forth: "Dare you, sir, ask a verdict of such a jury as is here sitting
upon this testimony?--you, sir, who under the verdict of nature must
soon appear before the awful bar to which you now strive prematurely to
consign this noble, this gallant young man! Should you succeed, you
must meet him there. Could you, in the presence of Almighty God--He who
knows the inmost thoughts--justify your work of to-day? His mandate is
not to the gibbet. Eternal Justice dictates there, whose decrees are
eternal. Do you think of this? Do you defy it? If not--if you invoke
it, do it through your acts toward your fellow-man. Have you to-day
done unto this man as you would he should do unto you? I pause for a
reply--none. Then shudder and repent, for the record even now is making
up against you in that high court from which there is no appeal. You,
gentlemen of the jury, are no hired advocates: you are not laboring for
blood-money. Though your responsibility to your God is equal to his,
you will not go to the bar of your Creator with blood--guiltless
blood--upon your consciences. You will not, as he will, in that awful
presence, on that eventful day, look around you for the accusing spirit
of him whom you consigned to the gibbet with