missed the first train, and wandered about
brooding disconsolately in the mist till the second. At Liverpool his
suspicious, excited demeanor procured his momentary arrest. Since then
the thought of the lost girl has haunted and broken him. That is the
whole, the plain, and the sufficing story." The effective witnesses for
the defense were, indeed, few. It is so hard to prove a negative. There
was Jessie's aunt, who bore out the statement of the counsel for the
defense. There were the porters who saw him leave Euston by the 7:15
train for Liverpool, and arrive just too late for the 5:15; there was
the cabman (2,138), who drove him to Euston just in time, he (witness)
thought, to catch the 5:15 a. m. Under cross-examination, the cabman got
a little confused; he was asked whether, if he really picked up the
prisoner at Bow Railway Station at about 4:30, he ought not to have
caught the first train at Euston. He said the fog made him drive rather
slowly, but admitted the mist was transparent enough to warrant full
speed. He also admitted being a strong trade unionist, Spigot, Q. C.,
artfully extorting the admission as if it were of the utmost
significance. Finally, there were numerous witnesses--of all sorts and
conditions--to the prisoner's high character, as well as to Arthur
Constant's blameless and moral life.

In his closing speech on the third day of the trial, Sir Charles pointed
out with great exhaustiveness and cogency the flimsiness of the case for
the prosecution, the number of hypotheses it involved, and their mutual
interdependence. Mrs. Drabdump was a witness whose evidence must be
accepted with extreme caution. The jury must remember that she was
unable to dissociate her observations from her inferences, and thought
that the prisoner and Mr. Constant were quarreling merely because they
were agitated. He dissected her evidence, and showed that it entirely
bore out the story of the defense. He asked the jury to bear in mind
that no positive evidence (whether of cabmen or others) had been given
of the various and complicated movements attributed to the prisoner on
the morning of December 4th, between the hours of 5:25 and 7:15 a. m.,
and that the most important witness on the theory of the prosecution--he
meant, of course, Miss Dymond--had not been produced. Even if she were
dead, and her body were found, no countenance would be given to the
theory of the prosecution, for the mere conviction that her lover had
d