“Do you see him now?”.
“I cannot swear; but—but I think I do.”
“Is the prisoner who stands to the left the man you saw that night?”
“The voice is the same, the face is similar, and he wears the same habit—a long dark coat lined with light flannel.”
“Is that all you know of the matter?”
“I knew that a crime had been committed in my sight. I felt that a dead body lay close beside me. I was about to turn away, when I heard a third man come up and speak to the man on the horse.”
“You knew the voice?”
“It was the cottager who had given us shelter. I ran back to the barn, snatched up my two children in their sleep, and fled away across the fields—I know not where.”
Justice Hide asked the witness why she had not spoken of this before; three months had elapsed since then.
She replied that she had meant to do so, but it came into her mind that perhaps the cottager was somehow concerned in the crime, and she remembered how good he and his daughter had been to her.