as this; but there was never any telling! So
perhaps chatted the hanging recorder that evening
over his Madeira. Mr. Ally, keen and subtle,
had perhaps other feelings on the subject as that
night in solitude he mused over the subject;
but he was powerless, except to urge petitions
to government.

In a very able article, entitled Legal Puzzles,
in Blackwood's Magazine some years ago,
the "learned and able writer" sums up the
convincing (as he thinks) arguments of the guilt
of Eliza Fenning. They are these:

1. That she was convicted, despite of the
defence of able counsel (who was not allowed to
speak in her favour).

2. That from the 11th of April to the 26th of
July the case was repeatedly investigated by
the law officers of the crown, but nothing fresh
transpired in her favour. (The hanging
recorder was present at these consultations, and
his vanity would be of course roused not to let
the verdict be reversed. That is human nature.)

3. That though the girl ate a portion of the
dumpling after she had warned Gadsden of its
heaviness, she did so when old Mrs. Turner
was expected, to cunningly disarm suspicion.
(Killing one's self is an odd way of disarming
suspicion.)

4. That she made different and contradictory
statements as to the food in which the poison
was mixed. (How could a frightened innocent
girl, who was merely guessing, do anything else
but make tentative remarks?)

The arguments for her innocence are, we
think, incontrovertibly stronger.

1. There was no adequate motive for the
crime, nor was the girl by any means one of
those sullen malignant tempers who kill for
mere revenge. A month before she had been
rated, justly or unjustly; she then had expressed
momentary anger, perhaps exaggerated by her
evidently hostile fellow-servant. She herself
said in court that she liked her place, and was
comfortable.

2. No poison was traced to her, and she was
never seen with any poison.

3. Her caution to Gadsden was only kind,
professional, and natural, and her own sufferings
from the poison were most strongly in her
favour. Moreover, let us remember that no one
had then told her that the family had suspected
the dumplings.

4. Still stronger in her favour is the fact that
she made no effort to remove the pan, which
still contained poison, and which, after all,
furnished the only positive proof that arsenic had
been mixed with the food which had been eaten.

A little imagination could conceive a thousand
ways by which the poison, kept with such criminal
carelessness in an open office drawer, had got
mixed with waste paper, and been thoughtlessly
taken down into the kitchen. Let us suppose
the girl went, as she was allowed, to the office
drawer for waste paper to light the fire; had more
than she wanted; and carried the residue
downstairs for the use of the kitchen. The poison, a
year and a half tumbled about unheeded in the
drawer, in a tight flat packet pinched with twine,
might have leaked at one corner, and have
sprinkled the paper to the extent of a spoonful, at
least, without necessarily being noticed. That
paper may have been used to rub out the pan, or
to put the flour in, or for some purpose
connected with the fatal meal.

The popular mind has a keen sense of injustice.
That excellent and unswerving man, Sir
Samuel Romilly, boldly and generously
recorded his belief in Fenning' s innocence. In Lord
Sidmouth's time such an impugnment of the
governing wisdom was not without its dangers.
The people had borne pretty well for some
centuries being hanged for stealing five shillings,
for stealing a strip of cloth from a bleaching-
ground, for passing a bad shilling; old men
and children had gone to the gallows in hundreds
for the smallest felonies; but now a
terrible conviction seized people that judges, in
their anxiety to purge the commonweal of
perilous stuff, often leaned so much towards the
gibbet that they sometimes forgot justice.
There had been in this case palpable and cruel
prejudice or folly; innocent facts had been
wilfully distorted into proofs of guilt. The
public is but a grand jury, and it refused to
consider the girl as a would-be murderess.
She had not sufficient motive—so many
unaccountable accidents it was clear might have led
to the apparent crime. The friends of the poor
girl almost compelled Lord Eldon to rouse
himself in the matter. What was etiquette when a
human life was depending on the turn of a
moment? The lord chancellor, the recorder (now
Sir John Silvester, Bart.), and Mr. Beckett met
at Lord Sidmouth's offices. They decided that
nothing had occurred that should stay the
hangman's eager hand. The bias of government
then, was to resent with arrogance all popular
interference. The servants had got into the
bad habit of defying the masters who paid them.
The lawyers were, in fact, so certain of the
justice of the verdict, that Lord Eldon, to
satisfy his own—seldom satisfied—mind, and
to put a stop to the doubts of irritated
and alarmed people, held another meeting the
night before the execution, and came again,
singularly enough, to the very determination
to which they had long since determined to
come. To negative a recorder's sentence would
be to confess that the sentences of that good
servant of the crown had been often unjust.
That would never do.

The unhappy victim of some unaccountable
accident was put to death on Wednesday, July
26th, 1815. It is a sorry sight even to see a
bull-necked murderer, with ape's forehead and
cruel cretin eyes, appear upon the scaffold
before the Debtors' Door, trembling as he
unconsciously repeats the prayer. How agonising
is the shuddering look as the sickly eye is raised
involuntarily and falls on that one horrible object
that seems to fill heaven and earth—the gallows!
But here was a young and probably innocent girl
to be lifted up and killed before ten thousand
pitying people. No feverish hatred, no screams