to make a purchase since the murder of its proprietor.
On the day of the trial of Samuel Calcraft the town was thoroughly emptied of its inhabitants. The prisoner, when placed in the dock, became terribly agitated, and looked as though he would fall to the ground, and whispers reached me which showed that this was taken as further evidence of his guilt, though it did not appear to me at all surprising, considering his youth and the consciousness that most, if not all, of those present knew him, and believed him guilty of the murder.
It was my duty to put the case before the jury in the strongest light which the evidence appeared to me capable of sustaining. I had no personal feeling against the prisoner, of course, and it was rather from habit than design that I wove the evidence against him into my address in such a manner that even a jury altogether unprejudiced might have been induced to convict him. I looked at him as I finished my speech, and I shall never forget the expression of utter despair and horror with which he was regarding me, and which awoke in me a keener sense of the responsibility attaching to my office than I had ever felt before. His counsel had little to say in his defence. The only explanation he had to offer was that Calcraft had certainly had interviews, apparently mysterious, with his mistress, but that this was only for the purpose of conveying spirits to her, which she drank in large quantities without wishing anybody to know that she did so, and that this was the reason why he had made Jane Burton promise not to speak about having seen him. The knife he admitted was his, but asserted that it had grown rusty merely from want of use. The miniature he averred had been given to the prisoner by his master in order that he might clean the case, on the day preceding the murder, and he had put it in his room for safety’s sake. The purse he said had been given him by his master, and the money contained in it was his own savings. As for the watch, he denied most solemnly that he had put it where it had been found, or that he knew anything about it; and asserted that somebody must have put it in his chest after he was locked up.
I will not venture to say that the judge had formed a preconceived opinion of the prisoner’s guilt, or that he was influenced by the general desire to avenge the death of a man so deservedly esteemed as Exton, but he certainly summed up the case in a manner which I could not think impartial; I was not therefore surprised, knowing what I did of the public feeling respecting the case, when the jury returned a verdict of Guilty.
Sentence of death having been pronounced, the prisoner was carried out of court senseless.
It was in conducting this case that I first became acquainted with Dr. Dampier. We spent the evening together after the trial at his house, and I was very deeply interested in his discourse, especially in some of his theories touching life and death. The criminal trials and civil causes were so unusually numerous, that I had not left the town when the day arrived for the execution of the convicted murderer of Mr. Exton. On the morning of his execution he sent for me, and though I would have made any reasonable sacrifice to have avoided complying with his request, I could not under the circumstances refuse to go to him. I found that all he wanted of me was to beseech me to save his life. I told him I had no power whatever in the matter, that it was not to me he should appeal. He declared, in language which made those who heard it shudder, that he was innocent; and when they began urging him towards the scaffold, he turned towards me, and with a countenance stern in its expression and deadly pale, said: “You are my murderer, and if a murdered man can haunt you, I will.” And so he passed away to his death, and I into the official apartments to hear a case and give a gratuitous opinion concerning it. When I left about three quarters of an hour afterwards I looked up and saw the body still hanging.
The man who brought me the note from Dr. Dampier was Samuel Calcraft.
Having written for Dr. Dampier the statement for which he asked, I sent it to his house, and in return requested he would call upon me and give me the explanation he had promised. It was not long before he did so, and having received from me a promise that I would not divulge what he told me, I received from him the following statement:—
“You will, perhaps, remember that in the course of the conversation we had on the evening you dined at my house I mentioned some opinions concerning the length of time during which vitality might still remain in the human body after it had ceased to give any outward sign of its existence, and the result of some experiments I made with animals which had to all appearance been suffocated. As the opportunity of making such experiments with human beings seldom occurs, I determined to spare no pains to get possession of the body of Samuel Calcraft, and by means it is not necessary to describe, his body came to me, and his coffin with its substitute went the ordinary course, so that within two hours of his being strangled, his inanimate body was drawn from a sack which had been placed among a waggonload of faggots, driven by myself from the vicinity of the prison, while the owner of the vehicle was gone to get me change for a note with which to pay for the wood.
“I had a fire ready lighted beneath a large sand bath I had contrived in my laboratory, and having locked the door, I laid the to all appearance dead body in it, and carefully covered it with sand, the thermometer on being plunged in it marking 80°. There was not the slightest sign of life, the skin was cold, and the members already rigid. As soon as I had thus prepared the body, I inserted two small tubes in the nostrils connected with a large bladder of ammoniacal gas, of which I had several in readiness, and pressing gently on the bladder, I gradually forced the gas it contained into the lungs, from which I as gently expelled it. I had previously buried the wires from a galvanic battery of moderate power in the sand, the points lying beneath the base of the skull and the lower part of the spine. For upwards of an hour I continued to force the gas into the lungs and expel it by pressure without discovering any returning