the results, we found that a quantity equivalent to about one grain and a-half of the tartarised antimony had been abstracted in excess of this amount. The servant maid was the only person besides the Baron who usually had access to the apartment; and we at once sent for her and taxed her with having administered it to Madame R** in the arrow-root before mentioned. My own counsel was to give her immediately in charge, but the Baron pointed out, very justly, that there was nothing to show the girl that she was doing anything that could possibly affect life; and that, in the absence of any motive for such a crime, it was only fair to conclude that nothing was intended beyond a foolish practical joke. He said the same to the girl, and spoke to her very kindly indeed. At first she altogether denied it, and pretended to be quite astonished at such an imputation. The Baron, however, looked steadily at her and said, “Take care, Sarah! Remember what I said to you only three days ago.” She did not attempt then to deny it any longer, but said she was very sorry, but she hoped the Baron would forgive her. The Baron said he could not possibly retain her in his service, and she then begged of him not to send her away without a character. At this time I interfered, and said he would be very wrong to send her into any other family after playing such a trick. She again protested she had meant no harm, and the subject then dropped, the Baron saying he would take time to consider of it. From that time I attended Madame R** until my return to London, when she was clearly recovering. I did not enter into any conversation with her, as she seemed very reserved and of an unsociable disposition. The Baron seemed an unusually attentive husband. Talking over the subject of the seizure a day or two afterwards, he informed me that the death of his wife would also have been a severe loss in a pecuniary point of view, as if she lived she would inherit a considerable fortune. I asked him why he did not insure her life, and he said he should now certainly do so, but had not before thought of it. He called upon me about two months later, in passing through town, and informed me that he intended to travel abroad for some months. I recommended the German baths, and on his objecting to the crowds of English there, suggested Griesbach or Rippoldsau, in the Black Forest, where Englishmen are rarely to be encountered. It was too early for either place at that time, and I recommended the south of France until the season was sufficiently advanced. I did not see him again till October, 1855, when he again called upon me with Madame R**, who seemed perfectly restored, and of whom I had no difficulty in reporting most favourably to the Life Assurance Association, as also some weeks later to the Life Office of Dublin, when applied to for my professional opinion. I think Madame R**’s was an excellent life, and there could be no better proof of it than her entire recovery in the course of a very few months, or indeed weeks, from so severe an illness. The sensitiveness to antimony would not affect this opinion. Indeed Professor Taylor, in his work on poisons, points out distinctly the “idiosyncratic” action of antimony and other medicinals on certain constitutions, as “conferring on an ordinary medicinal dose a poisonous instead of a curative action.” I have a copy of his work now before me, in which he says that “daily experience teaches us that some persons are more powerfully affected than others by an ordinary dose of opium, arsenic, antimony, and other substances;” and again, in considering the probable amount of the “fatal dose,” he speaks of “that ever-varying condition of idiosyncracy, in which, as it is well known, there is a state of constitution more liable to be affected by antimonial compounds than other individuals apparently in the same conditions as to health, age,” &c. I did not, therefore, nor do I now, consider the sensitiveness of Madame R**’s constitution to that medicine any objection to her life, especially in view of the immense vitality shown by her recovery. With regard to the sleep-walking, I have had no hint from the Baron of such a propensity on the part of Madame R**. Certainly it was never suggested that she could have poisoned herself in that way. Indeed the servant girl admitted the act. The mode of Madame R**’s death does not in any degree shake my confidence in my former opinion, as such an occurrence might have happened, though by no means likely to do so, to any one in the habit of walking in their sleep, a propensity which in Madame R**’s case I had no means of ascertaining. I have been enabled to be thus precise in my statement, from the fact that the interesting nature of the case led me to make a special memorandum of it in my diary, from which the above is taken. I shall therefore have no difficulty in confirming any portion of it upon oath.
5. Statement of Mrs. Throgmorton.
