Old-World Trials. of this result. They promptly interfered and made it the statute law of Vermont to this day, that in any action at law the plain tiff may be heard to deny as many facts as a defendant is permitted to set up in his defence. I was not counsel in Moss v. Hindes, and "the mossy marbles rest " upon all who had anything to do with it. I do not think it was reported, and perhaps I do wrong in
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rescuing it from oblivion. I sometimes think that all these' "Reminiscences" de serve the replication de injuria sua propria. But the offence is chargeable to you; it will not be many times repeated. It tends to show how much wiser the present genera tion is than the last preceding. Hut is this generation having any better time or ex tracting any more amusement out of the profession than the last? Dubitatur.
OLD-WORLD TRIALS. III. THE ARDLAMONT CASE. SINCE the trial of Madeline Smith in 1857, for the alleged murder of her lover L'Augalier by arsenical poisoning, no case has moved the minds of the legal profession and the public in the United Kingdom more deeply than the cause eclcbre of the Queen v. Monson and Scott, which occupied the at tention of the Lord Justice Clerk of Scot land and a jury from Tuesday the 12th, to Saturday, the 23rd of December, 1893. The following sketch may enable your readers to decide how far the feverish ear nestness with which every fresh episode in the Ardlamont case has been watched on this side of the Atlantic was justifiable or natural under the circumstances. On the eve of the commencement of the shooting season, last August, an announcement ap peared in the daily papers that Lieutenant Cecil Hambrough, a young man of about twenty years of age, had shot himself by ac cident in a plantation on the estate of Ard lamont in Argyllshire. The catastrophe excited little attention at the time, for " acci dents by flood and field " in the pursuit of sport are unhappily by no means uncommon. But within a fortnight after Lieutenant Hambrough's death, which occurred on the
morning of the 10th of August, 1893, ru mors of foul play began to circulate, and at the end of the month the world was electrified by the news that Mr. Alfred John Monson, the lessee of the Ardlamont estate where Hambrough met his death, and Hambrough's army coach, had been arrested on a charge of having murdered him, and that another man named " Scott," who had appeared at Ardlamont a day or two before the tragedy and disappeared immediately thereafter, was " wanted " by the police as a principal in, or accessory to, Monson's al leged offense. "Scott" was never found, however; all the efforts of the crown to trace and prove his identity were unavail ing, and Monson was placed on his trial alone. The opening of the case was awaited with the keenest expectation. If Monson had been prosecuted in England, there would of course have been, first a coroner's inquest and then magisterial pro ceedings, and the public would have known beforehand with tolerable accuracy the case which the crown lawyers thought themselves in a position to establish. But in Scotland, things judicial are ordered differently. A prosecution is instituted by a Crown official,
