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TRIAL OF JOHN W. WEBSTER. 227
should not only have failed to notice these new and most obvious stains
upon the steps, or the fire in that furnace, where he had never known
one to have been burning before, but have also foreborne the most distant
intimation to these officers of the propriety of a more careful inspection
of the premises?
In singular connection with the profession of these oppressive sus-
picions, and the careless indifference with which they were accompanied,
consider the friendly intercourse between the parties in the afternoon
of that same day. Littlefield answered the call of the bell of Dr. Web-
ster, and found him in his private apartment. A few words of kindness
passed between them, and Dr. Webster gave him an order for a turkey,
as a present, for his Thanksgiving-dinner. It was accepted, and with
thanks. I confess I can hardly conceive how he touched that order,
much less how he could immediately, as he did, avail himself of its benefit,
if he believed that he was taking it from the red right hand of a bloody
murderer. I cannot imagine the sensations with which he sat down
to the repast it supplied on a day when he was to offer grateful thanks-
gipings to Providence for its sustaining protection and all its innumer-
able mercies. Yet this present was most readily accepted; and then,
such kindness softening the heart of one, and such suspicions rankling
in the mind of the other,-these two men walked togetheld from the Col-
lege in friendly conversation. They parted in apparent personal good
will, when they reached Cambridge street; the one to enjoy the grate-
ful intercourse of family associations,-the other to whisper dark inti-
mations of guilt against him by whom he had been treated as a friend
and a benefactor. I do not speak without proof; for Mr. Littlefield him-
self tells you, that, on that same evening when he was returning from
the lodge, he stopped at Dr. Hanaford's and spent an hour with him,
and during that time apprised him of his suspicions of the criminality of
Dr. Webster. Can such conduct be explained consistently with the opin-
ions he professed to entertain, or will the irreconcilable contradictions
between his actions and his declarations allow you to accept his testi-
mony as solid, substantial truth?
Go to the next day, Wednesday. He is seen watching the movements
of Dr. Webster in the laboratory. All, however, that he discovers is an
apparent preparation for a fire in the assay-furnace; and he very soon
discontinued his observations. He went to another part of the city,
and did not return until afternoon. It was about three or four o'clock
that he ascertained in a strange way that there had been a fire in the
furnace. He says, that, as he was passing through the dissecting-room
entry, the heat from the wall was so great that he felt it upon his face.
It seems to me scarcely possible that a fire in that furnace should have
produced such an effect. You have been there, and have seen the posi-
tion and arrangement of the furnace in reference to the heavy brick wall
which separates it from the entry, and can judge whether the statement
of Littlefield can be true. It deserves certainly a careful consideration.
But he felt, he says, the heat from the brick wall, and he thought, there-
fore, that the building was on fire! To ascertain this fact, and with no
purpose of searching for evidence of guilt or of homicide, after attempt-
ing an entrance at all the doors, he got into the laboratory without diffi-
culty through an unfastened window. He goes to the furnace and finds
but a trifling amount of fire, and he discovers no evidence that the build-
ing is in danger of conflagration. But he is now within these sealed
premises,-the scene where must have occurred the perpetration of the
crime of which his mind was filled with such strong and abiding sus-
picions. He has now full possession, and may make the most thorough
investigation without fear of interruption. He commences his search;
he goes to the open hogsheads of water, but finds nothing in them. But
though he had never known a fire to have been built in the assay-
furnace before, and now knew that there must have been one there of
extraordinary intensity, he would not even take off a mineral ox crucible
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