packets of arsenic for mice, kept carelessly in an
open drawer in the office, facing the fireplace.
The poison had been in two flat packets, tied
together very tight, and labelled:

"Arsenic—Deadly Poison."

The drawer in which the poison had been
kept, was a drawer in which waste-paper was
also put. The girl had been seen to go to the
drawer for paper. Eliza Fenning had access to
the room after the apprentice unlocked it in
the morning; but not at night, when it was
kept shut. On inquiry, the poison had been
seen by Gadsden on the 7th of March, but not
since that date. That was mysterious, and must
be traced further. The old gentleman then
went into the kitchen to peer about. He looked
into every pan for flour, yeast, or remains of
dumpling. He found at last, a brown pan stuck
round with some residue of the dumpling dough.
Mr. Turner cautiously swilled the pan with
water, and stirred it with a spoon until he had
made the dough into a pasty liquid. Then, to
his horror, he found, on setting the pan down
for half a minute, and subsequently slanting
the liquid, a suspicious-looking white powder
trail slowly over the bottom of the pan.

Mr. Turner showed this to several persons,
and then locked it up until Mr. Marshall, the
surgeon, came. Mr. Marshall looked grave when
lie saw the white powder. He soon carefully
examined the pan, and washed it round with a
tea-kettleful of hot water. He stirred the liquid,
let it subside, and decanted it off. He then
washed it a second time. The result was the
deposit of half a tea-spoonful of white powder,
and that white powder was arsenic. In the
fragments of pure yeast, and in the flour-tub, there
was no arsenic. Mr. Turner also showed to
Mr. Marshall, the knives and forks with which
the dumplings had been eaten; they were quite
black in the blades, and that blackness the
surgeon attributed to their having touched arsenic.
Mr. Turner then cross-examined the unhappy
girl, on whom all faces now frowned and looked
hard and condemning. The old man asked the
girl sternly, how she came to introduce
ingredients that had been so prejudicial to them?
Eliza Fenning replied that it had not been in
the dumplings, but in the milk Sarah Peer
brought in. It was in the milk; must have
been in the milk; that she persisted in. No
one but herself, she said, positively and frankly,
had (to her knowledge) mixed or had had
anything to do with the dumplings.

The Turners' faces grew darker and sterner.
The housemaid left Eliza alone, and was
silent when she spoke. The old man looked
pitying, but inflexible.

They whispered when she entered the room,
then became gloomily silent till she left
it. Even Gadsden avoided her when he
came down to the kitchen. No one seemed
inclined to take food from her hands. But
worse was to come. On the morning of the
23rd, Mr. Turner entered the kitchen, followed
by a dogged-looking man, who told her to
put on her bonnet at once and follow him.
Where? Why, "to the Hatton Garden police-
office." Charge—attempting to poison the
family of Mr. Orlibar Turner, on the 21st of
March.

While sitting sobbing in an ante-room of that
(to her) dreadful place, Eliza Fenning was asked
by Thisselton, the officer who had apprehended
her, and had examined her pockets and box,
without finding anything suspicious, if she had
at all suspected the flour? The poor girl said, in
a simple unsuspicious way, that she had made a
beefsteak pudding of the same flour with which
she had made the dumplings, and that she and
her fellow-servant and one of the apprentices
had dined off the pie. Thisselton then said
that if anything bad had been in the flour, it
must have hurt them as well as her. She then
said she had thought there was something in the
yeast; she had noticed a white settlement in it
after she had used it; or the other girl, who
was very sly and artful, might have put something
in the milk. Poor creature! She was
evidently racking her brain for all possible
causes of the intended crime, or of the accident,
whichever it had been.

The witnesses were all strongly biased
against this poor defenceless creature, and on
the 30th she was committed for trial. Gadsden,
when examined, mentioned that as he was
cutting the dumpling, Eliza had said to him (a
mere good-natured warning):

"Gadsden, don't eat that; it is cold and
heavy; it will do you no good."

The trial came on at the Old Bailey on Tuesday,
April 11, 1815. The prisoner was indicted
under the 43rd of George the Third, c. 58, which
made it a capital offence (everything was capital
in the then bloodthirsty state of the law) to
administer a deadly poison with intent to
murder. The recorder (a notorious hangman),
John Silvester, presided as judge. Mr. Gurney
(afterwards baron of the Exchequer)
conducted the case for the prosecution. Mr. Ally
(irritable Adolphus's irritable enemy) defended
the prisoner, and was most painstaking and
elaborate in his cross-examinations.

It was the savage and merciless custom
of those days not to allow the counsel to
speak for a prisoner upon the facts. No
final recapitulation and appeal to the jury was
permitted; the jury's often confused minds
were allowed to grope for the truth amid all
the prejudiced statements of interested
witnesses, the violence of hurried prosecutors,
and the natural difficulties of the case. In
charges of misdemeanour in civil actions and
where life was not involved, but property
(far dearer to our Draconic lawgivers of the
eighteenth century) was, the privilege was not
withheld from the barrister for the defence. It
was not till 1831 that this cruel and disgraceful
anomaly was done away with.

From the beginning, Mr. Silvester inclined
against the prisoner. At the close of his
charge, his bias approached criminality. He
decided that the poison was in the dough,