required signatures or attestations, to find much leisure for answering
individual questions. Some, however, listened with a marked air of
attention to my earnest request for the circumstantial details of the
case, but finally referred me to a vast folio volume, in which were
entered all the charges, of whatever nature, involving any serious
tendency--in fact, all that exceeded a misdemeanor--in the regular
chronological succession according to which they came before the
magistrate. Here, in this vast calendar of guilt and misery, amidst the
_aliases_ or cant designations of ruffians, prostitutes, felons,
stood the description, at full length, Christian and surnames all
properly registered, of my Agnes--of her whose very name had always
sounded to my ears like the very echo of mountain innocence, purity,
and pastoral simplicity. Here in another column stood the name and
residence of her accuser. I shall call him _Barratt_, for that was
amongst his names, and a name by which he had at one period of his
infamous life been known to the public, though not his principal name,
or the one which he had thought fit to assume at this era. James
Barratt, then, as I shall here call him, was a haberdasher--keeping a
large and conspicuous shop in a very crowded and what was then
considered a fashionable part of the city. The charge was plain and
short. Did I live to read it? It accused Agnes M---- of having on that
morning secreted in her muff, and feloniously carried away, a valuable
piece of Mechlin lace, the property of James Barratt. And the result of
the first examination was thus communicated in a separate column,
written in red ink--'Remanded to the second day after to-morrow for
final examination.' Everything in this sin-polluted register was in
manuscript; but at night the records of each day were regularly
transferred to a printed journal, enlarged by comments and explanatory
descriptions from some one of the clerks, whose province it was to
furnish this intelligence to the public journals. On that same night,