may have endured, that unhappy man at the Bar
has suffered, and is now suffering, more. If he had not been the kindest
of men, the most docile and most devoted of husbands, he would never
have occupied his present dreadful situation. A man of a meaner and
harder nature would have felt suspicions of his wife's motives when
she asked him to buy poison--would have seen through the wretchedly
commonplace excuses she made for wanting it--and would have wisely and
cruelly said, 'No.' The prisoner is not that sort of man. He is too good
to his wife, too innocent of any evil thought toward her, or toward any
one, to foresee the inconveniences and the dangers to which his fatal
compliance may expose him. And what is the result? He stands there,
branded as a murderer, because he was too high-minded and too honorable
to suspect his wife."

Speaking thus of the husband, the Dean was just as eloquent and just as
unanswerable when he came to speak of the wife.

"The Lord Advocate," he said, "has asked, with the bitter irony for
which he is celebrated at the Scottish Bar, why we have failed entirely
to prove that the prisoner placed the two packets of poison in the
possession of his wife. I say, in answer, we have proved, first, that
the wife was passionately attached to the husband; secondly, that she
felt bitterly the defects in her personal appearance, and especially
the defects in her complexion; and, thirdly, that she was informed of
arsenic as a supposed remedy for those defects, taken internally. To
men who know anything of human nature, there is proof enough. Does
my learned friend actually suppose that women are in the habit of
mentioning the secret artifices and applications by which they improve
their personal appearance? Is it in his experience of the sex that a
woman who is eagerly bent on making herself attractive to a man would
tell that man, or tell anybody else who might communicate with him, that
the charm by which she hoped to win his heart--say the charm of a pretty
complexion--had been artificially acquired by the perilous use of a
deadly poison? The bare idea of such a thing is absurd. Of course nobody
ever heard Mrs. Eustace Macallan speak of arsenic. Of course nobody ever
surprised her in the act of taking arsenic. It is in the evidence
that she would not even confide her intention to try the poison to the
friends who had told her of it as a remedy, and who had got her the
book. She actually begged them to con