nts of "influential" newspapers, persisted in teaching that the rights
of property could be more firmly cemented than by the shedding of
blood--law, justice, personal security more effectually vindicated than
by the gallows. Let me confess that I also was, for many years, amongst
the mockers, and sincerely held such "theorists" and "dreamers" as Sir
Samuel Romilly and his fellow-workers in utter contempt. Not so my
partner, Mr. Flint. Constantly in the presence of criminal judges and
juries, he had less confidence in the unerring verity of their decisions
than persons less familiar with them, or who see them only through the
medium of newspapers. Nothing could exceed his distress of mind if, in
cases in which he was prosecuting attorney, a convict died persisting in
his innocence, or without a full confession of guilt. And to such a pitch
did this morbidly-sensitive feeling at length arrive, that he all at once
refused to undertake, or in any way meddle with, criminal prosecutions,
and they were consequently turned over to our head clerk, with occasional
assistance from me if there happened to be a press of business of the
sort. Mr. Flint still, however, retained a monopoly of the _defences_,
except when, from some temporary cause or other, he happened to be
otherwise engaged, when they fell to me. One of these I am about to
relate, the result of which, whatever other impression it produced,
thoroughly cured me--as it may the reader--of any propensity to sneer or
laugh at criminal-law reformers and denouncers of the gallows.

One forenoon, during the absence of Mr. Flint in Wiltshire, a Mrs.
Margaret Davies called at the office, in apparently great distress of
mind. This lady, I must premise, was an old, or at all events an elderly
maiden, of some four-and-forty years of age--I have heard a very intimate
female friend of hers say she would never see fifty again, but this was
spite--and possessed of considerable house property in rather poor
localities. She found abundant employment for energies which might
otherwise have turned to cards and scandal, in collecting her weekly,
monthly, and quarterly rents, and in promoting, or fancying she did, the
religious and moral welfare of her tenants. Very bare-faced, I well knew,
were the impositions practiced upon her credulous good-nature in money
matters, and I strongly suspected the spiritual and moral promises and
performances of her motley tenantry exhibited as much discrepanc