fired into that room must mean malicious mischief Then any person who had brought himself up to the perpetration of this malicious mischief, and has made one unsuccessful attempt to accomplish his purpose, will probably follow up that object. Now, in Courts of Justice, we must reason according to the common conduct of mankind; we must form our conclusions from circumstances. To God alone are known the secrets of the heart: we can only judge of them, we can only decide on the conduct of men upon trial, by what we see and know of the ordinary conduct of the rest of mankind. Upon this story being stated, the neighbours naturally offer their assistance to protect the person who has thus been put into peril: they first offer to continue with the Prisoner that night? No," he says, "they won't come again to night." Well, but why not guard against the possibility of that? No, no; they won't come again to night. Well, but if you are to remain in the house alone, it were well to be guarded, to be prepared against the possibility of a repetition of the attack. Have you any means of defence? Yes; I have pistols: but have no ammunition. Well, I will furnish you with ammunition? No; I don't want any to protect me, or means to protect myself. I shall go home, and go to bed. And home he goes, and to bed. This, you observe, is the 19th of September.

On the next day he writes to his partner, Mr. Blight, at Margate, and he gives an account of this most extraordinary and alarming transaction; and he says, he hopes it may turn out to have been accidental, that for himself he knows no person that can have any animosity against him-that he wishes to know for whom this had been intended, whether himself or Mr. Blight, and wishes for his counsel upon that subject; and he concludes his letter in language you may consider somewhat remarkable --"I shall be happy to receive a few lines from you, but much more to see you, as you are the only friend I have to consult with.'

Gentlemen, I for one have not discovered the necessity of this call of Mr. Blight immediately from Margate-I admit it was extremely fit that there should be measures of caution taken-I admit that an instant application to the Police would have been extremely judicious under those circumstances, and that to communicate the circumstance to Mr. Blight was extremely natural; but I do not see the necessity of thus bringing his partner up to London ;-this letter is not very short, it is not confined to a few lines; and considering the anxiety which the Prisoner knew Mr. Blight felt on the subject of the payment of the 1000. one should have expected that there would have been in some part of it a nota bene, either Goom has taken up his note which you expected to be taken up this day, or he is not in a condition to take it up, but has given me some security which you will think sufficient; this letter, however, is absolutely silent upon the subject of Goom's money. Mr. Blight receives this at Margate, and without loss of time comes to London, where he arrives on, Monday, the 23d of September.

The first object of enquiry when he came, I take for granted was into the circumstances of this firing on the preceding Thursday, but it does not appear to have been considered by any of the parties to be of so much importance as to induce them to take any precautionary steps upon it.

The next object of enquiry of Mr. Blight, I believe, was as to the payment of this 1000l. about which he had been for some time uneasy, and the Prisoner, you will find, certainly did not communicate to him that which he had done immediately upon his leaving town, namely, that he had forbid the banker's presenting the draft upon the 20th, and stated, that he had another satisfactory security in substitution for it; if any thing was to be communicated to Mr. Blight, that was a natural thing to communicate, but, upon the contrary, he led Blight to believe that the money was not only perfectly safe, but forthcoming, and as I shall prove, and you will find it

extremely important, because you will find the Prisoner expressly denying that any such circumstance took place; you will find the Prisoner took a journey to London for the express purpose of procur ing that money, with a positive peremptory inhibi tion from his partner against returning till it should be procured; he returned in the afternoon, and what passed between them it is not in my power to state; the day passed on till evening, they drank tea toge ther; it was then proposed, they should have some grog-they were each taking their glass of grog till about eight in the evening.

I have stated that the family usually spent their evenings in the front parlor, into the window of which front parlor the first shot on Thursday the 19th was fired; they, the Prisoner and the deceased, for the first time passed their evening in the back parlor; upon that Monday, in that back parlor, by somebody, Mr. Blight was shot and murdered.-Now, it appears to me, that with all attention to the chaste and proper discharge of my duty, and I do assure you I am most anxious so to conduct myself, I should neglect that duty, if I did not here enquire, what would have been the conduct of any body who had intended a fatal blow, either to the Prisoner or to Mr. Blight? but from what has happened we must understand it to be Mr. Blight-if any body who had made that attack upon Thursday had intended to repeat it on the Monday, where would that person, acquainted with the habits of this family, have found himself, in order to accomplish his purpose and perpetrate the crime: -you are, I presume, ready to answer, certainly in the front parlor, in which the family always sat, and were naturally to be found.-But, on this evening, they were sitting in the back parlor; and at eight o'clock you will find the Prisoner Patch quitting that back parlor in which he had thus been sitting with his friend, who had been travelling all night, who was drowsy, and had been drinking grog, quitting him and going to the maid servant in the kitchen close adjoining,

and there asking her for the key of the counting house, and for a candle, stating that he was disordered in his bowels, and that it was necessary for him immediately to go to the necessary. You will not forget, for a reason I shall state presently, that he made that declaration; it is a thing that does not ordinarily occur to proclaim those necessities, particularly to persons of the other sex, but you will find that declaration to be a circumstance not unimportant in the consideration of this case;-he goes out, therefore, of this kitchen with a candle in his hand-he passes the door of the room in which Blight is sitting, that door he leaves open, he goes to the street-door, which he opens, and leaves it open, he opens the gate in the front of the streetdoor, he turns round to the counting-house, the door of which he unlocks and passes on to the privy through the counting-house, and, according to the testimony of Kitchener, he raps the door of that privy hard, which of itself does not fall to hard, but he raps the door of that privy hard, and, as she described, she instantly saw the flash of a pistol at the door of the parlor where her master was sitting, and before she could reach the dresser, which, according to my recollection of distance, is rather further than from me to the Prisoner,* her master came into the kitchen, rested upon the dresser, and stated himself to be a dead man, putting his hand upon the wound which had been, in the time I have mentioned, inflicted upon him;—the maid-servant rushes forward, and finds the streetdoor and the gate open, and she immediately does that which instinct, I think, under such circumstances, suggests, she shuts that street-door to, it went upon a spring lock, and by the time she has got it to, the Prisoner at the bar is knocking loudly for atmission at that door.

Now, Gentlemen, the only difficulty that I have seem in this case, if it deserves the name of one, is that which grows out of the representation I have now given of Kitchener, as to time, because she says that having heard *Four or five feet,

the Prisoner slam the door of the privy, she instantlý saw the flash at the door of the parlor, and if you are to take that representation to be literally correct, and to mean what you and I should mean by instantly, if the door of this Court was to be thrown to, and I at the same instant should level a pistol at you, to be sure the thing is impossible; but may I not, even in a criminal case of this high importance, ask you whether your own constant and hourly experience does not teach you, that in the most tranquil seasons, but above all in seasons of alarm, if you were called upon to recollect when such a thing succeeded another. thing, is there any circumstance which we describe or measure so ill, and with so little certainty and precision, as time?-do not you hear persons of the highest respectability differing even as to hours in their narration of the same transaction? this must be familiar to us all; if any man will ask himself of any occurrence that has happened to him, take it in sickness or health, in times of business or pleasure, take it in any of the ordinary transactions of life, and it is one of those things about which there is the greatest difficulty: If indeed there were nothing else in the cause but this to be sure you would give great weight to the expression coming from the witness, that she saw the thing at a time at which I, for the prosecution, admit, taken in the strict letter of the expression, is impossible, because the same person could not be at the privy and the parlor-door at precisely the same moment; what I state is, that the Prisoner either went to the privy, or had the appearance of going there, instantly returned and shot the deceased, and then went out for the purpose which I shall state presently, and returned to the door the instant the girl had shut it.

You will not forget the state of the tide as I described it to you; you will be so good as now to learn, that in the front of the house there is a paved court enclosed by palisadoes and a gate; in the front of that there is a wharf, upon which there is not common street dit, but that sort of soil which will, in the