hands, and said that it was impossible for any words to describe the
horrors and agonies in her breast; that Mr. Cranstoun had ruined her;
that she had ever, till now, believed him a man of the strictest
honour; that she had mixed a powder with the gruel, which her father
had drank on the foregoing Monday and Tuesday nights; that she was the
cause of his death, and that she desired life for no end but to go
through a painful penance for her sin. She protested at the same time
that she had never mixed the powder with anything else that he had
swallowed, and that she did not know it to be poison till she had seen
its effects. She said that she had received the powder from Mr.
Cranstoun with a present of Scotch pebbles; that he had written on the
paper that held it, "The powder to clean the pebbles with"; that he
had assured her it was harmless; that he had often taken it himself;
that if she would give her father some of it now and then, a little
and a little at a time, in any liquid, it would make him kind to him
and her; that accordingly, about six weeks before, at breakfast-time,
her father being out of the room, she had put a little of it into his
cup of tea, but that he never drank it; that, part of the powder
swimming at top of the tea, and part sinking to the bottom, she had
poured it out of the window and filled up the cup with fresh tea; that
then she wrote to Mr. Cranstoun to let him know that she could not
give it in tea without being discovered; and that in his answer he had
advised her to give it in water gruel for the future, or in any other
thickish fluid. I asked her whether she would endeavour to bring Mr.
Cranstoun to justice. After a short pause she answered that she was
fully conscious of her own guilt, and was unwilling to add guilt to
guilt, which she thought she should do if she took any step to the
prejudice of Mr. Cranstoun, whom she considered as her husband though
the ceremony had not passed between them.