A very touching appeal was made for him to the jury
by a learned serjeant, who declared that his client was to lose his
wife and to be punished with extreme severity as a bigamist, because
it was found to be impossible to bring home against him a charge of
murder. There was, perhaps, some truth in what the learned serjeant
said, but the truth had no effect upon the jury. Mr. Emilius was
found guilty as quickly as Phineas Finn had been acquitted, and was,
perhaps, treated with a severity which the single crime would hardly
have elicited. But all this happened in the middle of the efforts
which were being made to trace the purchase of the bludgeon, and
when men hoped two or five or twenty-five years of threatened
incarceration might be all the same to Mr. Emilius. Could they have
succeeded in discovering where he had bought the weapon, his years
of penal servitude would have afflicted him but little. They did not
succeed; and though it cannot be said that any mystery was attached
to the Bonteen murder, it has remained one of those crimes which are
unavenged by the flagging law.
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