“Not guilty, your honor.”

The opening charge of the State’s Attorney had been carefully prepared.  Mr. Thomson had never in his life had so important a case upon his hands, and he was resolved to make the most of it.  His speech was well reasoned, logical, eloquent.  To destroy in the minds of the jury every favorable impression left by the late blameless and beneficent life of Mr. Willcoxen, he did not fail to adduce, from olden history, and from later times, every signal instance of depravity, cloaked with hypocrisy, in high places; he enlarged upon wolves in sheeps’ clothing—­Satan in an angel’s garb, and dolefully pointed out how many times the indignant question of—­“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”—­had been answered by results in the affirmative.  He raked up David’s sin from the ashes of ages.  Where was the scene of that crime, and who was its perpetrator—­in the court of Israel, by the King of Israel—­a man after God’s own heart.  Could the gentlemen of the jury be surprised at the appalling discovery so recently made, as if great crimes in high places were impossible or new things under the sun?  He did not fail to draw a touching picture of the victim, the beautiful, young stranger-girl, whom they all remembered and loved—­who had come, an angel of mercy, on a mission of mercy, to their shores.  Was not her beauty, her genius, her goodness—­by which all there had at some time been blessed—­sufficient to save her from the knife of the assassin?  No! as he should shortly prove.  Yet all these years her innocent blood had cried to Heaven in vain; her fate was unavenged, her manes unappeased.

All the women, and all the simple-hearted and unworldly among the men, were melted into tears, very unpropitious to the fate of Thurston; tears not called up by the eloquence of the prosecuting attorney, so much as by the mere allusion to the fate of Marian, once so beloved, and still so fresh in the memories of all.

Thurston heard all this—­not in the second-hand style with which I have summed it up—­but in the first vital freshness, when it was spoken with a logic, force, and fire that carried conviction to many a mind.  Thurston looked upon the judge—­his face was stern and grave.  He looked upon the jury—­they were all strangers, from distant parts of the county, drawn by idle curiosity to the scene of trial, and arriving quite unprejudiced.  They were not his “peers,” but, on the contrary, twelve as stolid-looking brothers as ever decided the fate of a gentleman and scholar.  Thence he cast his eyes over the crowd in the court-room.