wish it might be for ever concealed from human eyes. But as we are now
making inquisition for blood it is absolutely necessary for me to make
some observations upon that chain of circumstances that attended this
bloody contrivance and detested murder.

[Illustration: Captain Cranstoun and Miss Blandy
(_From an Engraving in the British Museum_.)]

Experience has taught us that in many cases a single fact may be
supported by false testimony, but where it is attended with a train
of circumstances that cannot be invented (had they never happened),
such a fact will always be made out to the satisfaction of a jury
by the concurring assistance of circumstantial evidence. Because
circumstances that tally one with another are above human contrivance.
And especially such as naturally arise in their order from the first
contrivance of a scheme to the fatal execution of it.

Having suggested this much, I shall now proceed to lay before you
those sort of circumstances that seem to me to arise through this
whole affair, and leave it to your judgment whether they do not amount
to too convincing a proof that the prisoner at the bar has knowingly
been the cause of her own father's death, for upon the prisoner's
knowledge of what she did will depend her fate.

Of all kinds of murders that by poison is the most dreadful, as it
takes a man unguarded, and gives him no opportunity to defend himself,
much more so when administered by the hand of a child, whom one could
least suspect, and from whom one might naturally look for assistance
and comfort. Could a father entertain any suspicion of a child to
whom, under God, he had been the second cause of life? No, sure, and