in the narrow and uncomfortable pen which a
considerate country sets apart "for barristers
only," waiting on from minute to minute in the
conviction that the jury "must make up their
minds soon." Gradually a few of the diners
gravitated back again, serenely superior in the
nothing-can-touch-me feeling of the epicure. The
prisoners were of course removed while their fate
was in the balance, and the clerk of assize seemed
almost consoled for his enforced abstinence from
dinner, by the extinction of the baleful light of
Mrs. Winsor's eye. Never was lamer and more
impotent conclusion than the upshot of that
first trial, when the jury "gave it up" and when
the miserable prisoners were once more placed
at the bar, to learn that money, time, and wits,
have been wasted, and that they must again to
the prison whence they came, there to wait till
the time should come for the terrible and
wearing ordeal to be gone through again. Harris,
by this time, had sobbed herself into a state
almost of indifference; bewilderment seemed
the uppermost feeling in her mind when this
resuIt was announced. As for Winsor, her face
showed no appreciable feeling whatever: only,
as she left the dock, she bestowed a parting
glare, more in sorrow than in anger, on the
clerk of assize.

The season changed, and once more the two
prisoners were placed at the bar. The Winsor-Harris
case had acquired new interest in the
interval. It was known that we were not, this
time, to sit through a mere second edition of the
old trial, but that one of the most dangerous
anomalies of our law was to be brought into
play, and Harris was to be admitted approver
against her accomplice. The peculiar atmosphere
of suspicion and dislike which surrounds
a "sneak" in every condition of life, dispelled
most of the sympathy which Harris's
good looks and tears had won for her at the
first trial. Nor were those looks as good now as
then. The face had changed strangely; it was
sharpened and lined, and hardened too, I thought:
with an odd scared look about the eyes, as if
Harris had been perpetually speculating on what
was to become of her, and entertained very vague
notions touching the results of "turning Queen's
evidence." Mrs. Winsor, on the other hand,
looked much more human than before—as a
legendary witch might, after being suspended for a
time from the use of the broomstick—but not
a whit less dogged or impassible. Once, and
once only, she cried, or tried to cry; but it was
only for a moment, and she relapsed into utter
indifference to everything and everybody, except,
the clerk of assize: whom she apparently took
up, as it were, where she had left him off
some months before. But she gave one glance
now and then—as when Harris left the dock for
the witness-box—which darkly suggested Artemus
Ward's frame of mind when a gentleman
who had "done" him expressed a hope that
they might meet in the happy huntin' grounds:
"If we du, there'll be a fight."

I am not going to recapitulate Harris's
evidence. The hideous story she told of Winsor's
proposal to her, and of how she considered it;
how she took up her quarters, at length, in
Winsor's house, her mind made up. and her
purpose half avowed; how they discussed ways and
means over a cup of tea, while the professional
child-murderess related her previous experiences
without reserve, and with a satisfaction only
qualified by the retrospect of bad debts; how,
at length, the thing was quietly done while the
mother waited in the next room—all this was
told at length. It was not the details of the
story to which we listened, that gave to the telling
of that story its greatest horror. It was the
manner in which it was told. Even the case-hardened
barrister who put the necessary questions
could scarcely ask them in the usual matter-of-
fact way. No such misgivings troubled the
witness Harris. In an altitude of quiet,
respectful attention, her pretty face expressing
nothing but the ordinary embarrassment of a
young woman in the witness-box—perhaps even
with a shade more of self-possession than is usual
in such a case—her sweet and low, but perfectly
firm voice recalling to the memory what had been
testified in her favour about her tenderness in
sickness—without a trace of hesitation in her
manner, without a sign of shame or shrinking,
she told her story. Any one coming suddenly into
court, knowing nothing of the subject-matter
of the trial, would have said, on first seeing and
hearing her, "What a pretty, modest girl! And
how truthful and straightforward!" and would
have thought that she was telling an every-day
story about some little piece of household
peculation. It was impossible to doubt the truth of
her evidence. Dangerous as it must always be to
permit one prisoner, herself arraigned and
un-acquitted, to convict another of the very crime
with which she is charged, nobody could, in this
case, suppose that injustice was done to Winsor.
The effect which the telling of that story made
upon most of the crowd who filled the court,
was very strange. The manner of the witness
seemed to affect them with the feeling that this
was but an every-day occurrence.

The palladium of British liberties is often
dense; in Devonshire it is apt to be denser
than elsewhere; and at this trial it had a denser
look than is usual even in Devonshire. None
of the twelve good men and true seemed to
take any very great interest in the affair; and
the gaping foreman was on the broad grin all
the time: as if the whole thing were an
excellent joke. Of the public, to judge by their
faces, some were interested, some amused, some
bored, a few impressed. Yet the kindly gentleman
and upright judge who tried the case has
himself told the present writer that he never, in
all his experience, met with anything so shocking,
and so haunting to the memory.

With the conviction and sentence of Charlotte
Winsor, all but the final scene might have been
supposed concluded. But she was to be the
central figure of two more trials. Exeter had
done with her; but Westminster claimed her.
At the last moment before her appointed
execution, judicial wisdom in high places made
the discovery that she ought never to have
been tried the second time; that a murderer