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TRIAL OF JOHN W. WEBSTER. 239
erned nor suppressed, and which cannot now be described or hardly
imagined. From that time forward, he continued for many hours in the
state of total prostration into which he had fallen. So utterly was he
overcome and mastered by the complication of his sufferings, that he
made no attempt to speak when the mangled limbs of the discovered
body were exposed in his presence to the view of anxious spectators.
When it was at length perceived how incapable he was of appreciating
his own situation, or even of faintly observing the objects which were
before him, it was determined to withdraw him from the College, and
return him to the prison. He was then borne away by the officers by
whom he had been supported. As he was placed by their strength in
the carriage, he fell almost a lifeless body upon its seat. A kind word
from Mr. Andrews, the keeper of the jail,-the first tone of kindness
which had yet fallen upon the ear of the unhappy prisoner,-feebly
awakened his attention; but he was scarcely conscious of the words he
heard, or of those he uttered. A few broken sentences escaped him.
"You pity me," he said, "what for?" "Because of your excitement,"
was the reply. "Oh! that is it," he added, and relapsed into silence, and
spoke no more. He was transported back without further delay to the
jail, and locked into one of its cheerless and solitary cells. Do you dig-
cern in these events and these exclamations, gathered from the testi-
mony of all the witnesses who observed him during those hours of
excruciating and indescribable suffering, the proof g upon which a, fellow-
being may be justly stripped of liberty and life,-his body sent to the
scaffold, and his name consigned to infamy? It cannot be. It would
be as unjust and criminal to take a word that fell from his lips during
all this period of physical and mental prostration as a basig of convic-
tion, as to go to the halls of the Insane Hospital, and seize upon the out-
break of the raving maniac as legitimate evidence upon which a victim
might be hurried off by a capital execution to an ignominious grave.
The next morning found him in the same state of extreme debility
and exhaustion to which he had been reduced by the overwhelming
calamity which had befallen him. A few hours more brought him par-
tial relief. He awoke to new life, and with it to a faint sense of his
awful and perilous condition. Of the means by which this effort for his
ruin was attempted, and of the evidence upon which the terrible accusa-
tion against him was made, he was wholly ignorant. But, in the first
moment of dawning reason from that night of darkness and shame and
distress and agGay, without the possibility of previous study or premedi-
tation, he spontaneously announced, in a few and simple, but most
comprehensive words, the whole of his defence= "I do not believe,"
said he to a man whom ho was then for the first time in sixty years to
call his jailer, "I do not believe that those are the remains of Dr. Park-
man; but I am sure I do not know how in the world they came there."
That, still at this hour, is the defence on which he rests. He cannot tell
you how they came there; he cap-not unfold to you the deep mystery of
circumstances which have been made to bear so fearfully against him.
But he calls your attention unceasingly to that secret agency, the reas-
onable probability of which, he earnestly submits to you, the circum-
stantial evidence of the Government does not, to a moral certainty,
exclude.
And, amidst all the uncertainty which cannot but accompany the con-
clusions and presumptions which are drawn from the vast and accum-
ulated masses of that circumstantial evidence, he asks that the laws of his
country shall secure his safety under the aegis of that reputation which
sixty years of a quiet, humane, and peaceful life, have established and
confirmed. He brings it to you in the fulness of uncontradicted testi-
mony. He lays before you the testimonials of a whole community, frorii
the President of the University to the mechanic at his bench. From all
classes of his large acquaintance, as they cluster round him, you have
one common voice bearing grateful witnegs of his gentleness and
humanity.
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