redress as might now be given for a most gross injustice.  The man had been put to a very great expense, and had been already in prison for ten or eleven weeks, and his further detention would be held to have been very cruel if it should appear at last that the verdict had been wrong.  The public press was already using strong language on the subject, and the Secretary of State was not indifferent to the public press.  Judge Bramber thoroughly despised the press,—­though he would have been very angry if his ‘Times’ had not been ready for him at breakfast every morning.  And two or three questions had already been asked in the House of Commons.  The Secretary of State, with that habitual strategy, without which any Secretary of State must be held to be unfit for the position which he holds, contrived to answer the questions so as to show that, while the gentlemen who asked them were the most indiscreet of individuals, he was the most discreet of Secretaries.  And he did this, though he was strongly of opinion that Judge Bramber’s delay was unjustifiable.  But what would be thought of a Secretary of State who would impute blame in the House of Commons to one of the judges of the land before public opinion had expressed itself so strongly on the matter as to make such expression indispensable?  He did not think that he was in the least untrue in throwing blame back upon the questioners, and in implying that on the side of the Crown there had been no undue delay, though, at the moment, he was inwardly provoked at the dilatoriness of the judge.

Public opinion was expressing itself very strongly in the press.  ’The Daily Tell-Tale’ had a beautifully sensational article, written by their very best artist.  The whole picture was drawn with a cunning hand.  The young wife in her lonely house down in Cambridge which the artist not inaptly called The Moated Grange!  The noble, innocent, high-souled husband, eating his heart out within the bars of a county prison, and with very little else to eat!  The indignant father, driven almost to madness by the wrongs done to his son and heir!  Had the son not been an heir this point would have been much less touching.  And then the old evidence was dissected, and the new evidence against the new culprits explained.  In regard to the new culprits, the writer was very loud in expressing his purpose to say not a word against persons who were still to be tried;—­but immediately upon that he went on and said a great many words against them.  Assuming all that was said about them to be true, he asked whether the country would for a moment endure the idea that a man in Mr. Caldigate’s position should be kept in prison on the evidence of such miscreants.  When he came to Bagwax and the postmarks, he explained the whole matter with almost more than accuracy.  He showed that the impression could not possibly have been made till after the date it conveyed.  He fell into some little error as to the fabrication of the postage-stamp in the colony, not having quite