had milk been refused at that door, has not yet been attempted by Lord Deas, or any other who holds that the "old gentleman is free from all suspicion." If Mrs. Maclachlan's agents are to be believed, she had told them of this call of the milkboy early in August, before they had seen or heard of the milkboy; and it does not appear that the public prosecutors were apprised in time of what he could prove, or old Mr. Fleming would have been warned against tumbling into such a frightful pitfall. To the question how she should have known of the call of the milkboy, and that no milk was taken, there is only one credible answer, so far as we can see, and that is that she must have been in the house at the time; and it very improbable that she remained there, running the risk of detection in the most needless manner, without old Fleming's knowledge. How he should know that the servant required no milk, and be so ready to answer the door for her before his usual hour of rising, and why the regular supply of milk should not be taken into that house only on the three mornings that she lay dead in it, have not yet been explained on the theory of his innocence.

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Another fact spoken to by the milkboy is not much less adverse to him. The milkboy heard him take the chain off the door before he opened it. Now he had sworn that the chain was not on the door, and that it was merely on the sneck, and that whoever had gone out had gone out by it. The theory of his innocence which he had to swear to was that the murderer had gone out by the front door, which he found standing on the sneck at nine o'clock in the morninga theory which does not well agree with his taking off the chain at twenty minutes before eight in the morning. But according to Mrs. Maclachlan's statement his taking off the chain is natural enough, for no one had left the house at this time; so that fact also is confirmatory of her statement, and strongly condemnatory of old Fleming.

There is yet another point of evidence of the same character, and that is the washing of the floor of the kitchen and bedroom.

The floor of the kitchen seemed to have been washed at different times, and when the police surgeon and the police were called in, a part of the kitchen floor was damp, and it was dry two hours afterwards. Who did that washing? Not Mrs. Maclachlan, for no one alleged that she had been there from Saturday morning. If she washed the floor she must have done it all at once. It is therefore as certain as anything proved by circumstantial evidence can be, that she did not wash the floor. Indeed she had no reason to do it, if she went there merely to rob the house, and commit murder if necessary to allow her to rob. A robber who had been under the necessity of committing murder, would hardly stay to wash the floor, but would take what booty he could find and decamp at once. But the theory of the Crown was, that although Mrs. Maclachlan probably heard old Fleming jump out of bed in the room above her, when she was hacking her friend to death in the room below, she stayed to wash the kitchen in order to avert the suspicions of the old man, whom she was supposed to have calculated upon giving no alarm for three days! But has the Crown any theory for the washing of parts of the floor of the bedroom in which the dead body was locked up? No suspicion could be averted by that; for after the bedroom door was opened the murder was disclosed. But on the floor of that bedroom there were three foot-prints left marked in blood. They were quite visible. No attempt had been made to wash them out. They were undoubtedly the foot-prints of the prisoner. If she washed that floor, she did it after four o'clock of a July morning, when it was broad daylight, and when she must have seen these foot-prints. For what better purpose could she have washed the floor than to have washed them out? For what better purpose could old Fleming have washed part of it than to have washed out his own and left Mrs. Maclachlan's there to testify against her should he happen to be suspected? Whether these three bloody foot-prints were left intentionally or not, the washing of the floor was much more like the act of one who was to

remain in the house, than of a thief who was to leave it as fast as possible; and it is certain that the washing of the floor which had not dried when the police came in, could not have been done by Mrs. Maclachlan. A policeman on the beat swore that he saw two women coming out of the house on Saturday evening between eight and nine, and that the prisoner was not one of them. But Lord Deas disposed of his evidence by asserting that he had mistaken the number of the house. One of the most favourable circumstances for old Fleming, indeed, we may say, the circumstance that has saved him from being in the condemned cell of Mrs. Maclachlan, is, that there was no blood on his clothes; as it was on the other hand a damning circumstance against her, that there was a great deal of blood upon her clothes; those shreds of clothes that she had endeavoured to dispose of, by dropping them in the fields about Hamilton. But for her, there is this to be said, that there was a great deal too much blood upon her clothes for simple murder. They were saturated with blood, and that they would not have been although she had hewed Jessie McPherson to pieces. In that case a few spurts of blood, showing themselves in isolated drops, most likely on the upper part of her dress, is all that could have been expected. saturation of her petticoats is rather confirmatory of her statement, that she came into contact with this blood in nursing and not in wounding her friend. The spots of blood that start out upon a murderer from his victim, seldom go through the outer dress, and they alight on those parts of it that are nearest the limbs that are engaged in wounding. But what are the parts of this woman's clothes that are produced with marks of blood on them? Not the sleeves and body of her gown. A sleeve of the gown in which she is assumed to have committed the murder is produced without any blood on itnot one spot. The bloody rags that are produced are her petticoats, and as we can gather from the evidence, the flounced skirts of her gown and her crinoline. And the stains of blood are not the spots that bespeak actual murder, but the

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saturation that would necessarily happen to nursing, and which might happen to one cleaning away blood. In short, her clothes, if duly considered, prove her innocence rather than her guilt. They prove that her connexion with this deed of blood was an innocent connexion in so far as they prove anything. Much stress is laid upon no clothes of old Fleming being found with blood on them, but it ought to be remembered that he had three days to dispose of his bloody clothes. If Mrs. Maclachlan had not taken the most infatuated way possible to dispose of her clothes, she too might have been in the position of having none with blood on them. Perhaps, however, some of them might have been not accounted for, to her possession of which her lodger and her washerwoman and other acquaintances could swear, as they did to the rags found in the fields. But who can tell that all old Fleming's clothes are accounted for? who knew what clothes he had? Most likely only Jessie McPherson.

If his son knew, it does not seem likely that his son would speak out, and there was nothing to hinder the old man during the three days he was alone, with a full coal-cellar and a large kitchen fire at his disposal, from burning an entire suit of clothes and a great deal besides. Mrs. Maclachlan says she saw him burn his bloody shirt in the kitchen, and after the trial it turns out that a detective found a button among the ashes, and gave it to the Fiscals, but they suppressed that bit of evidence. There is a part of the wood-work of the kitchen missing. Surely Mrs. Maclachlan had no reason to dispose of that, just as little as she had to wash the bedroom floor and the cleaver.

The conduct of old Fleming at the time the body was discovered might have been very important either for him or against him if observed by strangers. But of the impression it made we have only one uncertain glimpse. His son told the doctors and the police that there was a key in the inside of the door of the servant's room, that he pushed it out with the store room key, and that he heard it fall on the floor. He afterwards denied that he had done so and said he must have been

mistaken; but the reverse was clearly proved by the doctors and by the police, one of whom went to look for the key, and told Mr. Fleming that he could not find it.

This story of the key in the inside of the door was of course a suggestion that the door had been locked from within, and of suicide. And why should Mr. John Fleming have suggested suicide if he did not suspect his father?

There are many other points too numerous to mention in detail, or to mention at all; such as the multitude of the wounds, there being no less than forty of them; also the character of the wounds. If simple murder to facilitate theft was intended, and the attack had been begun during her sleep in bed, as Lord Deas suggested, why not cut her throat, or kill her at a blow? The police surgeon said that some of the wounds had the appearance of being inflicted after death, but how long he made no attempt to estimate. Must they have been inflicted more than three hours and a half after death and after four o'clock on that July morning? And there are other questions, such as whether Mrs. Maclachlan had time to wash the kitchen, and the room, and the cleaver, and the sheet, and to rifle the house, all in three hours and a half? And whether her remarkable statement corresponds with the appearances the doctors and the police observed in the house, or is inconsistent with them? So far as we can judge from the materials in evidence it is not inconsistent with them, but the reverse.

Regarding the administration of criminal law in some foreign countries, we should hesitate to be censorious, because their barbarism would be their excuse; but Scotland is a country comparatively civilized, and is therefore inexcusable, and we cannot choose but say, that the investigation regarding this murder reflects very little credit upon the practice of criminal law in Scotland. The police alone seem to have done their work respectably and not to have merited public reprobation. But the Procurators Fiscal were too keen and unscrupulous. The public opinion seems to be that they