when the occupant came to the door, shot him dead, and then tried to escape, but was captured.  Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man he afterward took swift vengeance upon with an assassin bullet had knocked him down.  Such was the Baldwin case.  The trial was long and exciting; the community was fearfully wrought up.  Men said this spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused grief enough in his time, and now he should satisfy the law.  But they were mistaken; Baldwin was insane when he did the deed—­they had not thought of that.  By the argument of counsel it was shown that at half past ten in the morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven hours and a half exactly.  This just covered the case comfortably, and he was acquitted.  Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of madness.  Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions and remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute.  The Baldwins were very wealthy.  This same Baldwin had momentary fits of insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had grudges against.  And on both these occasions the circumstances of the killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been hanged without the shadow of a doubt.  As it was, it required all his political and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and cost him not less than ten thousand dollars to get clear in the other.  One of these men he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve years.  The poor creature happened, by the merest piece of ill fortune, to come along a dark alley at the very moment that Baldwin’s insanity came upon him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun loaded with slugs.

Take the case of Lynch Hackett, of Pennsylvania.  Twice, in public, he attacked a German butcher by the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and both times Feldner whipped him with his fists.  Hackett was a vain, wealthy, violent gentleman, who held his blood and family in high esteem, and believed that a reverent respect was due to his great riches.  He brooded over the shame of his chastisement for two weeks, and then, in a momentary fit of insanity, armed himself to the teeth, rode into town, waited a couple of hours until he saw Feldner coming down the street with his wife on his arm, and then, as the couple passed the doorway in which he had partially concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner’s neck, killing him instantly.  The widow caught the limp form and eased it to the earth.  Both were drenched with blood.  Hackett jocosely remarked to her that as a professional butcher’s recent wife