kind of singing and dancing, at the
neighbouring public-houses, finding reward in
occasional glasses of Torkavian gin, or the less
frequent halfpenny. On one occasion she is
fabled to have decoyed a young farmer, of a
feeble turn of mind but in comfortable circumstances,
into her cottage in the gloaming, before
her husband (who seems to have been innocent
of any knowledge of the manner in which his
partner beguiled her leisure hours) had returned
from his day's work, to have secured him with
strong rope, and then, producing a carving-knife,
calmly proposed to inflict wounds upon
him in default of a round sum for ransom. The
alarmed bucolic paid and escaped; but never, it
is said, disclosed this adventure until his
tormentress was lodged within the walls of Exeter
jail. Charlotte must have found such ready-
money transactions more gratifying than the
bad debts which she sometimes incurred in
the more ordinary course of her business;
indeed, it is strange that so acute a
practitioner should have given credit so freely
in a class of contracts which the law would
scarcely have recognised as binding. There
was something almost pathetic in her
reproaches to a young woman whom she had
"done for before," and who coolly asked for a
renewal of her services, without having paid the
three and sixpence contracted to be paid on the
first occasion.

The circumstances which led to the arrest of
Charlotte Winsor and Mary Harris for the
murder of the latter's male child are fresh in
the memory of the legion of newspaper readers.
When the prisoners were first put on their
trial together, there was little foreshadowing
of the interest which the case was afterwards
to assume. There were vague rumours
afloat, touching the prisoner Winsor's character
—hints of horrid stories hushed up, of lost
children unaccounted for, of the odd reputation
of the cottage by the railway; but nothing
that might not be explained by a natural
popular prejudice against the most unprepossessing
specimen of womanhood that ever
graced a dock. Never was the brand of evil
stamped in such full relief upon a face.
Perfectly still and unmoved she sat all through the
trial, with an eye as fixed and expressionless as
glass; this eye she kept riveted upon the clerk,
of assize—to his manifest discomfort, and
much after the manner of a student of electro-
biology staring at the magic circle. The mere
fascination of that lacklustre orb might have
been the death of countless innocents. If
there were any speculation in it at all, it
seemed to have for its subject the relative
amount of boredom involved in her own position
and that of the worthy officer whom she was
contemplating. At times, too, she might have
been regretting that three and sixpence.

No greater contrast could have been
presented to this woman's manner than the look
and demeanour of the younger prisoner. A
pretty and attractive girl, overwhelmed with
shame and terror, sobbing from the beginning to
the end of the weary trial, as if her heart would
break. The sympathies of everybody in court
seemed to be hers from the first. Even among
the proverbially hard-hearted barristers who
heard and weighed the damning evidence against
her, there were some who could not resist a
belief in her innocence: still less, a hope that the
jury would let her off. One of the witnesses,
a lady in whose service she had lived, spoke of
her as an exceptionally tender and careful nurse
in cases of sickness.

Her counsel had a great opportunity, and
did not neglect it. Sublime were his appeals
to the feelings of that poor girl's twelve intelligent
fellow-countrymen—heartrending his
disquisitions on maternity—pathetic his peroration.
But how was it possible to feel or to create
sympathy for so forbidding a client as Mrs.
Charlotte Winsor, who, after favouring her
advocate with one dull stare, relapsed into her
morbid contemplation of the clerk of assize,
as if he offered, on the whole, a more profitable
theme for speculation? The learned counsel
did what he could. He pictured the happy
domestic hearth of the British matron, with
peace on the right and tranquillity on the
left (immediately corrected, with much geographical
discrimination, into peace on the left and
tranquillity on the right), contrasted it with its
desolate condition in the matron's absence, and
ended by "leaving the prisoner's cause with
confidence," &c. Devonshire jurymen are skilful
at concealing their ideas (or the absence of
them), and it was impossible to judge what
impression the defence made upon that distinguished
body of our fellow-countrymen. Charlotte
herself did not appear to think much of
it, though apparently wondering what effect it
made on the mind of the clerk of assize. It was
at about six o'clock on a Saturday evening
when the jury retired to consider their verdict.
How long they deliberated is matter of history,
only to find at midnight that they could not agree.
"How can you expect it, with such fellows as
them in a box?" exclaimed one indignant member
of the body: a well-to-do farmer with a face
like Mr. Rogers, of the Haymarket, in Cool as a
Cucumber. The exquisite good sense of our
law was made manifest by the judge being
placed in the dilemma of finding himself forced to
choose between dismissing the puzzled twelve on
the spot, locking them up till Monday morning
without food or fire, or, as a last alternative,
sapping the foundations of the Church of England
by taking a verdict (if he could get one)
on the Sabbath-day.

It had been a curious scene in court during
the hours of waiting for the verdict. The buzz
of excited interest and general speculation as
to the result, which rose on the retirement of
the jury, grew more and more intermittent
until it was lulled into a weary silence and a
languid curiosity, only strong enough—as what
feeling is not?—to keep the crowd in their places
while the hours rolled by. The lawyers dropped
off one by one, as the calls of appetite became
more pressing, till only two or three of them,
keener or younger than their fellows, remained
to keep watch, white-wigged and sleepy-eyed,