collection was incomplete. These, and similar anecdotes, tending to prove
how fatally any vehement desire, morbidly cherished, may suspend the
normal operations of reason and conscience, were whispered about by Dr.
Lloyd's vindictive partisan; and the inference drawn from them and applied
to the assumptions against myself was the more credulously received,
because of that over-refining speculation on motive and act which the
shallow accept, in their eagerness to show how readily they understand the
profound.

I was known to be fond of scientific, especially of chemical experiments;
to be eager in testing the truth of any novel invention. Strahan,
catching hold of the magistrate's fantastic hypothesis, went about
repeating anecdotes of the absorbing passion for analysis and discovery
which had characterized me in youth as a medical student, and to which,
indeed, I owed the precocious reputation I had obtained.

Sir Philip Derval, according not only to report, but to the direct
testimony of his servant, had acquired in the course of his travels many
secrets in natural science, especially as connected with the healing
art,--his servant had deposed to the remarkable cures he had effected by
the medicinals stored in the stolen casket. Doubtless Sir Philip, in
boasting of these medicinals in the course of our conversation, had
excited my curiosity, inflamed my imagination; and thus when I afterwards
suddenly met him in a lone spot, a passionate impulse had acted on a brain
heated into madness by curiosity and covetous desire.

All these suppositions, reduced into system, were corroborated by
Strahan's charge that I had made away with the manuscript supposed to
contain the explanations of the medical agencies employed by Sir Philip,
and had sought to shelter my theft by a tale so improbable, that a man of