Now, there is a letter to which I will call your attention, of the 19th November, 1855, from Palmer to Pratt--“Dear Sir,--You will place the £50 I have just paid you, and the £450 you will receive from Mr. Herring, together £500, and the £200 you received on Saturday,” that is, the £200 that Fisher paid to Pratt at the express request of Cook “towards payment of my mother’s acceptance for £2000, due 25th October, making paid to this day the sum of £1300.” Can you doubt when you take all that together--the dining together on the Friday--Cook writing that letter to Fisher, saying it was of the greatest importance to him as well as to Palmer that the £200 should be paid in order to pacify Pratt, can you doubt that on that day Cook was a most convenient friend to Palmer, and that he could not by any possibility do without him. But it does not end there. Cook died on the Wednesday morning early, the 21st; if we want to know what effect that death had on Palmer, and what interest he had in it, Palmer’s mouth being sealed, we must get it from Pratt. Nobody else that we know knows anything about it; Cook is gone. On the 22nd November, the day after the death--and I am sure you will make some allowance for a day having elapsed after the death of Cook before he wrote--Palmer writes thus to Pratt--“Ever since I saw you I have been fully engaged with Cook and not able to leave him.” Now, unless he murdered him, that is the truest sentence that ever was expressed. He watched the bedside of his friend; he was with him night and day; he attended him as a brother; he called his friends around him; he did all that the most affectionate solicitude could do for a friend that was ill, unless he was plotting his death--“And I am sorry to say after all he died this day, so that you had better write to Saunders; but mind, I must have ‘Polestar’ if it can be so arranged; and should any one call upon you to know what moneys Cook ever had from you do not answer the question.” Then he says, “I sat up two full nights with Cook.” That he sat up the whole of the night may not be true, but he was ready to be called if Cook should be ill; and Elizabeth Mills says after the first serious paroxysm, when she went to bed, she left Palmer in the arm-chair, sleeping by the man whom they say he intended to murder. No! murderers do not sleep by their victims in that way. What is the answer? I read it to you in order that you may see what ruin Cook’s death brought upon Palmer. The answer of Pratt is--and you will see how much it increased the difficulties of Palmer--“I have your note, and am greatly disappointed at the non-receipt of the money as promised, and at the vague assurance as to any money. I can understand that your being detained by the illness of your friend has been the cause of your not sending up the amount.” Attend to this paragraph--“The death of Mr. Cook will now compel you to look about as to the payment of the bill for £500, due the 2nd of December. I have written Saunders informing him of my claim, and requesting to know by return what claim he had for keep and training”; so that the very first effect of Cook’s death was, in Pratt’s opinion, who knew all about it, to saddle Palmer alone with the sum of £500. He says, “The death of Cook will now compel you to look about as to the payment of the bill for £500 on the 2nd of December.” We will investigate the transaction out of which that bill arose, and you will see, I venture to say, that I can satisfy you conclusively that the transaction out of which that bill arose was a transaction for Cook’s accommodation, for which Palmer had lent his name to accommodate Cook, and for which upon Cook’s death Palmer became primarily and alone responsible. It will be for you to judge, if I prove that to you, whether it suited Palmer at that moment to stand before the holder of that £500 bill--some client of Pratt’s--as the only man liable upon it, and whether there was the same chance, supposing it had been for his own accommodation, of putting it on, as they call it, after Cook’s death, as there might have been before. But let me be fair to the prosecution, and state to you now the view that the Attorney-General takes of that £500 transaction. As I told you, I mean to meet his case foot to foot, and to show, and I hope to show him, that there is nothing in it; that if he, as the law officer of the Crown, had had the option of taking up this case or not, he would not have taken it up; that the Crown never would have appeared upon it, but because the universal feeling of the country was such as to render it impossible that the case should not be tried after the verdict of wilful murder obtained on Dr.