MARY ANN NEWARK has known the prisoner from childhood, and says: "He was a lively, smart boy.”

Honest ADAM GRAY was a friend of the prisoner's parents, and says: "He was a smart boy, was very active; always thought him a pretty cunning kind of a boy."

Dr. BRIGGS knew him twelve years ago, as "a lad of ordinary intelligence for boys of his condition."

ROBERT FREEMAN was a fellow servant with the prisoner, at the American Hotel, eight years ago, and though he never entered into any argument with the prisoner to find out his mother-wit, he says: He was playful betimes, seemed to understand every thing,

and very active."

Dr. VAN EPPS knew the prisoner in his early infancy, and says: "He then appeared as bright and intelligent as children generally are at that age.”

THOMAS F. MUNROE, a witness for the people, certainly not partial to the prisoner, says: "In his youth he was quick and active, and not much different from other black boys."

A. A. VANDERHEYDEN, a witness for the people, represents the prisoner as "active and intelligent" in his youth.

ARETAS A. SABIN, a witness for the people, knew the prisoner fifteen or sixteen years ago, and says that he was no more or less playful than other boys, and that he wept on entering the State Prison at the age of sixteen.

JEFFERSON WELLINGTON, a hostile witness, testifies that the prisoner was sociable and talked freely upon general subjects at the age of sixteen.

LEWIS MARKHAM has known the prisoner from childhood, and declares that "he was a smart boy, pretty actice, quick, sprightly, shrewd, attentive and faithful, without any lack of conversational powers."

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ETHAN A. WARDEN received the prisoner into his family fifteen or sixteen years ago, as a bright boy, and took him for the reason that he was so," and now declares that "he was then a lad of good understanding, and of kind and gentle disposition."

SALLY FREEMAN, the prisoner's mother, gives this simple account of him: "When he was young he was a very smart child, before he went to the State Prison. He was always very playful and good-natured. About understanding things he was the same as other children."

Finally, DEBORAH DEPUY, who is of the same age with the prisoner, of the same caste, and moves in the same humble sphere, testifies that she' knew him before he went to the State Prison, in childhood and youth;" that "his manners, action, and mind were very good-as good as other boys;" that she " associated with him; he was as bright as any body else; he was very cheerful;" she had "been with him to balls and rides: he acted very smart on such occasions;" she had talked with him often, and never discovered any lack of intelligence."

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Such, gentlemen, is a complete picture of the childhood and youth of the prisoner at the bar. Its truthfulness and fidelity are unquestioned, for all the witnesses on both sides have drawn it for you.

Look on that picture and then on the one I shall now present, and, since I must speak of a class lowly and despised,

"Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their humble joys and destiny obscure:
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor."

You have seen that the prisoner wept, as well he might, when he entered the State Prison at the age of sixteen. It was the last manifestation he has ever given of a rational mind.

ETHAN A. WARDEN says: "I saw the prisoner in the State Prison. He appeared stupid and different from what he used to be, and from what I expected he would be, I cannot describe the difference; it was so peculiar. I said to him, 'Bill, are you here?"

and repeated the question two or three times; at first he did not understand, but at last said, Yes.' He appeared changed."

JOHN DEPUY Saw the prisoner in the State Prison at five different times, but was not allowed to speak with him. Depuy says the prisoner "was carrying something on his back like a knapsack, and walking back and forth in the yard. He did not appear as he did before he went to prison. He appeared stupid, took no notice of anything. He did not know me, and took no notice of me. I saw him at other times when at work and when idle, and then thought there was something the matter with him. I thought he was not in his right mind."

WILLIAM P. SMITH was a foreman of one of the shops in the State Prison during the third year of the prisoner's confinement there, and had charge of him. He describes him as " passionate, sullen, and stupid." This witness relates that the prisoner had oiled his shoes neatly and set them upon a wood pile, that a convict accidentally disturbed the shoes, and that the prisoner struck the convict with a billet of wood with great violence, for which offence he was punished; that at another time, with as little provocation, he attacked another convict with great fury for displacing some yarn on a reel. The witness says: "When I sent him on an errand, he required repeated and very particular instructions. I considered his intellect at the time very low indeed. He knew very little, not much more than a brute or beast."

THERON R. GREEN, who was a keeper in the prison and had charge of the prisoner, declares that he "had very little mind, was a half-day man, was slow, awkward, dull, downcast, and would have frequent freaks of laughing, without any observable cause of laughter." The witness tried to instruct him in his cell on Sundays, but he could learn nothing." Mr. Green says: "He was irritable, malicious, and of bad temper; often violated rules, for which I did not punish him, because I thought him irresponsible. I think that he had as much capacity as a brute beast. I don't know as he had more. If more, there was none to spare. I remarked when he left the shop, that he ought not to go at large."

HORACE HOTCHKISS was a teacher in the Sunday School at the State Prison, and says that the prisoner "was dismissed from the school because he could not be taught to read."

Such is the imperfect history of the prisoner at the bar, while he was shut up from the observation of men, and deprived by the discipline of the State Prison of the use of speech and of the privilege of complaint.

He was discharged from prison on the twentieth of last Sep

tember.

ALONZO WOOD, the new chaplain of the State Prison, visited him in his cell there twice during the last month of his confinement, and asked him questions, which the pri soner noticed only by inclining his head. The chaplain expressed a hope to him on the day of his discharge that he might be able to keep out of prison thereafter, and inquired whether he wanted a Bible." I understood him to say," says the witness, "that it would be of no use that he couldn't read." At the Clerk's office he received the usual gratuity of two dollars, for which he was required to sign a voucher. He answered, "I have been in prison five years unjustly, and ain't going to settle so.”

The officers, including the reverend chaplain, laughed heartily at what they thought gross ignorance.

The prisoner's faithful brother-in-law, JOHN DEPUY, was waiting in the hall to conduct him homeward. His narrative is simple and affecting. "I sat down," says Depuy, "on the long chair in the hall. He came out and passed me as if he didn't know me. I went up and touched him, and asked him if he knew me, and he kind o' laughed. We came along to Apple

gate's, where I stopped to assist to raise a new building. He sat He sat there and acted very stupid They asked me what damned fool I

down on a pile of boards. and dull and said nothing. had with me sitting there?

"He didn't know the value of his money. He had received four half dollars, and thought they were quarters. We went to the hatter's for a cap-found one worth half a dollar; he threw down two halves. I handed one back to him, and told him to come out. After he came out, he insisted that he had paid only half enough for the cap, and that they would make a fuss about it." All the leisure hours of that day and the next were spent by the prisoner, according to DEPUY's account, in giving relations of the injustice and cruelty he had suffered in the prison. He was very deaf, and assigned as the cause of it, that Tyler, one of the keepers in the prison, had struck him across the ears with a board, and had knocked his hearing off so he couldn't hear, and his hearing had never come back. "I asked him," says the witness, "if they had done anything for his deafness. He said, 'Yes, they put salt in my ear, but it didn't do any good, for my hearing was gone and all knocked off."

Again. The prisoner told DEPUY that while eating, he had broken his dinner knife in the prison, and the keepers had threatened to put him back five years for that; and says DEPUY, "he asked me if they could do it." He complained to DEPUY, as we shall have occasion to see hereafter, that he had been wrongfully imprisoned, and wanted to find the people who had done him such injustice, for the purpose of getting pay from them.

Such was the change which had come over the prisoner. The bright, lively, social, active youth of sixteen, had become a drivelling, simple fool.

The prisoner remained with DEPUY some two or three months. He asked for esquires, to get warrants for the people who put him in the state prison; at one time said the justices refused to give him warrants; at another time, that "he had got it all fixed," and he wanted DEPUY to go down and see that he got his pay right; at another, said that "he couldn't do nothing with them—they cheated him all the time, and he couldn't live so." He followed DEPUY seven miles, to Skaneateles, and brought him back to Auburn, to help the prisoner in a dispute with Mr. Conklin, the harness-maker, about sawing some wood, for which he claimed

thirty-seven and a half cents, and Conklin refused to pay him more than twenty-five cents. DEPUY, dealing with the prisoner as Dr. BRIGHAM would, made peace by paying him the difference, and settled in the same way a difference between the prisoner and Mr. Murfey, the merchant.

DE

The prisoner's mind was very unsteady during the winter. PUY continues: "IIe did not know half the time what he was doing; he would go up the street, and then turn and run violently in the other direction. He never commenced any conversation with any body, never asked a question; smiled without cause; got up out of his bed at night many times, sometimes two or three times in the same night, and on such occasions would sing irregularly, dance and spar, as if with a combatant; saying sometimes: 'By God! I'll see you out;' sometimes he would take a book and mumble words as if reading, but there was no sense in the words. When asked afterward what he got up nights for, he answered that he didn't know." The prisoner never talked with anybody after coming out of prison, unless to answer, in the simplest way, questions put to him.

Many persons remember the negro, with his saw, deaf, sad and sullen, seeking occupation about the wood-yards, during the halfyear of his enlargement. Few stopped to converse with him, but the report of all confirms what has been testified by DEPUY. Those who knew the prisoner at all, were chiefly persons of his own

caste.

MARY ANN NEWARK says that she saw him after he came out of prison, and he resided with her several days before the homicide. He did not recognize her in the street. “He sat still and silent when in the house, asked no questions, and answered quick and shortlike. His manner of acting was queer-like; he never mentioned any name or spoke of anybody."

NATHANIEL HERSEY, the prisoner's old friend, found him changed, had to speak loud to him; "he appeared to be quite stupid." HERSEY asked him what ailed him; "he said he was deaf, that they rapped him over the head at the prison."

ROBERT FREEMAN discovered that he appeared downcast when he first came out of prison. He spoke to the prisoner, who took no notice. Robert took hold of his hand and asked him how he did. The witness says, " He appeared more dull and downcast, and I could not tell what the matter was; could never establish any communication with him."

Old ADAM GRAY, who knew him as a "pretty cunning kind of a boy," testifies: "I think there is a change in him. It doesn't seem to me that he knows as much as he did before he went to prison. He doesn't seem to talk as much, to have so much life, nor does he seem so sensible. Last winter he boarded with me two months. He would get up nights, take his saw and go out as if he was going to work, and come back again and go to bed. On such occasions he would try to sing, but I couldn't understand what he said. He made a noise appearing as if he was dancing."

Some three weeks before the homicide, the prisoner was boarding at Laura Willard's. The truthful and simple-minded DAVID

WINNER, Seems to have been led by Providence to visit the house at that time. He says

"I saw him first at his uncle, Luke Freeman's. He then appeared to be a foolish man. I asked if that was Sally's son. I did not know him. They told me it was. I said, he is very much altered. They said, he had just come out of State Prison. He had altered very much in his looks and behavior. He was sitting down in a chair in the corner, suiveling, snickering and laughing, and having a kind of simple look. I spoke to him; he didn't speak; I saw nothing for him to laugh at. I staid three days and three nights at Laura Willard's, and slept with William in the same bed. At night he got up and talked to himself; I couldn't understand what he said. He appeared to be foolish. I gave him a dollar to go down to Bartlett's to get a quarter of a pound of tea and two pounds of sugar, and to the market and get a beef steak. He went to market and got it all in beef steak. He got a dollar's worth of beef steak. When I asked what that was for, he said nothing, but laughed at me. He got up nights two or three times, and I felt cold and told Laura I wouldn't sleep with him any more, and I went and slept in the other room. I got afraid of him, and I wouldn't sleep with him any more. He sung when he got up nights, but you couldn't understand what he sung. There was no meaning in what he sung."

change. If I talked He didn't act cheer

DEBORAH DEPUY says, "After he came out of prison, there was a to him very loud he would talk, say very little only to answer me. ful, but very stupid; never said any thing until I talked to him. He never talked to me as he did before he went to prison. He had a strange smile. He would laugh very hearty without anything to laugh at. He would'nt know what he was laughing at. lle would knock at the door, and I would let him in, and he would sit down and laugh. I would ask what he was laughing at; he said he didn't know. When I asked questions, he would either answer yes, or no, or don't know. I asked him how his hearing was burt. He said they struck him on the head with a board, and it seemed as if the sound went down his throat. I have asked him why he was so stupid. I don't think he is in his right mind now, nor that he has been since he came out. The reason is that he never used to act so silly, and sit and laugh so, before he went to prison."

His mother, SALLY FREEMAN, describes the change which had come over her child, in language simple and touching: "I never knew he was foolish or dumpish before he went to prison. After he came out of prison, he didn't act like the same child. He was changed and didn't appear to know anything. As to being lively after he came out, I didn't see any cheerfulness about him. He was either sitting or standing when I afterwards saw him, and when I asked him a question he would answer, but that is all he would say. He appeared very dull. He never asked me any questions after he came out, only the first time he saw me he asked me if I was well. From that time to this he has never asked me a question at all. He didn't come to see me more than half a dozen times. When he came, perhaps he would ask me how I did, and then sit down and laugh. What he laughed at was more than I could tell. He laughed as he does now. There was no reason why he should laugh. He was laughing to himself. He didn't speak of anything when he laughed. I never inquired what he laughed at. I didn't think he was hardly right, and he was so deaf I didn't want to. I asked him how he got deaf, and he told me his ear had fell down, or some such foolish answer he gave me. He would stay an hour or so. He generally sat still. I went to see him in the jail after he killed the Van Nest family, on the first day of the trial. He laughed when I went in, and said he was well. I talked to him. I asked him if he knew what he had been doing. He stood and laughed. I asked him how he came there. He didn't say much of anything, but stood and laughed. When I went away he didn't bid me good-bye nor ask me to come again. I have never been to see him since, and have never received any message from him of any kind since he has been in jail. I don't know that he noticed me when I was on examination before. I don't think he is in his right mind, or that he has been since he came out of prison. The reason is that he acts very foolish, and don't seem as though he had any senses."

You will remember that we have seen the prisoner a smart, bright, lively, cheerful, and playful youth, attending Deborah Depuy at balls, parties, and rides; for negrocs enjoy such festivi