of obtaining indubitable testimony is in their
power, and they will make use of it. Let the
prisoner, on the day of the inquest, be conveyed
to the room where the body lies; and let him be
made to take his dead brother-in-law by the hand,
and to touch his wounds; for, according to an
old opinion, there are certain particles belonging
to our mortal frame which, " when hurried from
the actions of vitality by a violent death, do, as
endeavouring to revenge their wrongs, fly in the
face of the murderer, and, though in such minute
parts as are too subtle for the observation of
sense, keep still hovering about him, and, when
he is brought to touch the murdered body which
was their former habitation, by the motion of
sympathy call from the sally-ports of life some
of those parts of life which yet remain within
it:" * the result being that the wounds will
commence bleeding afresh. Therefore let the
prisoner be taken under a strong guard before
the honourable coroner and jurymen.

Again we stand in the room where Mr. Fussell
was murdered. The dead body lies, covered with
a white sheet, upon a table; and the jurymen,
who have just been viewing it, are standing
round. To them enters Major Strangeways,
handcuffed and guarded, and is straightway
ordered, in the name of the law, to take the
corpse by the hand, and to touch the wounds.
The cloth is thrown back, and he does so— with
a visible shudder, as they all think, passing over
his whole frame; but the blood about the ragged
bullet-holes has grown thick and black, and it
does not start to sudden redness, nor flow forth
to meet the manacled hand that rests upon it.
To the confusion of all great-grandfathers, and
the discomfiture of hereditary wisdom, the ex-
periment is a manifest failure; unless, indeed,
the prisoner should in fact be innocent. But,
although all present would have hailed the
success of the attempt as an incontestable proof
of the man's guilt, they will not accept its failure
as any sign of the contrary. So Strangeways is
led into an adjoining chamber, to be present
during the inquest. His face is very pale and
grave, and his lips are very white; but there is a
certain confidence in his manner, which did not
exist when he was brought in, and which is
probably induced by the negative result of the
ordeal he has just passed through.

Before any witnesses are called, and before
the court adjourns to the inquest-room, the
foreman of the jury stands up, and says he has
a proposal to make; which is to the effect that
all the gunsmiths' shops in London and the
suburbs should be visited, with a view to ascertaining
what muskets had been lent or sold on
the day of the murder, as a clue might thus
possibly be obtained, by which the perpetrator
might be discovered. Thereupon one of the
jurymen, who is himself a gunsmith— a Mr.
Holloway— observes: " Gentlemen, the thing is
not to be done with any amount of diligence,
on account of the great number of my trade
in and about London. Besides, several may
have lent guns on that day, and yet not to
the murderer of Mr. Fussell. Indeed, I myself
lent one, though I do not know to whom."

Here the coroner interposes: "Let the
musket which was found in the prisoner's possession
when he was taken be produced, and
shown to Mr. Holloway." The weapon is brought
forward, and handed to the gunsmith, who examines
it closely. By the Lord, he thinks he
recognises it! Yes, he is now very sure that
he does, by reason of a certain mark which distinguishes
this from other guns in his shop. Beyond
a doubt, this is the very musket he lent
on the morning of the murder: he can swear
to it.

He lays it down with an expression of awe
and wonder, which passes from face to face of
every one in the room. And while they are
gazing at each other silently, they hear the prisoner,
in a loud, strange voice, exclaiming from
the inner chamber that the hand of God is in
the matter, and that he is guilty.

The room grows indistinct to our sight; the
coroner, jurymen, and constables (obliged to
acknowledge, mentally, that their great-grand-
fathers might possibly in some small matters be
in the wrong), pass from the scene, and the
scene itself is changed.

For now we behold Major Strangeways standing
at the bar of the Old Bailey, this 24th of
February, 1659. He is charged with murder,
and, on being required to plead, replies that he
will do so only on condition of being allowed to
die the same death as his brother-in-law, in the
event of his being found guilty; but that, if this
be refused, he will refrain from pleading, and
thus, according to the law as it then stood, preserve
his estates, to bestow them upon his friends,
instead of suffering them to pass to the Crown.
However, the law in those days was not to be
lightly balked of anything it might consider its
due. It dealt much in revenge and torture;
was not calm and dignified, but irritable, petulant,
full of perpetual references to brute violence
and rage. Does the prisoner persist in Ms determination?
Yea, then, since he is so hardy,
there is a way of trying his fortitude, of which
he shall not lack a specimen. The wisdom of
the before-mentioned ancestors is again brought
into operation, for they have happily transmitted
to their posterity, as to children incapable of
managing their own affairs, a mode of punishing
such stiff-necked criminals. Hearken to the
Lord Chief Justice Glynn:

"The prisoner shall be put into a mean house,
stopped from any light, and be laid upon his
back, with his body bare; and his arms shall be
stretched forth with a cord, the one to the one
side, the other to the other side, of the prison,
and in like manner shall his legs be used; and
upon his body shall be laid as much iron and
stone as he can bear, and more; and the first
day shall he have three morsels of barley-bread,
and the next shall he drink thrice of the water
in the next channel to the prison-door, but no

————————
* Account of the case in the Harleian Miscellany.
Bacon, in his Natural History (Century X., par. 958),
mentions the same opinion, apparently with some
degree of belief in its truth.