seems, may be found guilty is indicted for murder in the first
degree.

The trial of women for crime invariably arouses keen public
interest, and the dethronement of a Czar, or the assassination
of an Emperor, pales to insignificance before the prosecution
of a woman for murder. Some of this interest is fictitious
and stimulated merely by the yellow press, but a great deal of
it is genuine. The writer remembers attending a dinner of
gray-headed judges and counsellors during the trial of Anna
Eliza, alias "Nan," Patterson, where one would have supposed
that the lightest subject of conversation would be not less
weighty than the constitutionality of an income tax, and
finding to his astonishment that the only topic for which they
showed any zest was whether "Nan" would be found guilty.

One of the earliest, if not the earliest, record of a woman
being held for murder is that of Agnes Archer, indicted by
twelve men on April 4, 1435, sworn before the mayor and
coroner to inquire as to the death of Alice Colynbourgh. The
quaint old report begins in Latin, but "the pleadings" are set
forth in the language of the day, as follows:

"Agnes Archer, is that thy name? which answered, yes....
Thou art endyted that thou.... feloney moderiste her with a
knyff fyve tymes in the throte stekyng, throwe the wheche
stekyng the saide Alys is deed.... I am not guilty of thoo
dedys, ne noon of hem, God help me so.... How wylte thou
acquite the?... By God and by my neighbours of this town."