I have examined, these many years, the countenances of the gallows-bound, the branded, the hedge-witch, and the common knave, and I tell you that the visage of this Lindsay Clancy is among the most conclusive I have ever beheld. The lineaments do not equivocate. Observe the compressed and watchful mouth, the eyes that receive light without returning it, the forehead neither lofty nor receding but sealed, as if Nature herself had set a lock upon the moral faculty. Such a face is not the mask of sudden frenzy. It is the settled architecture of a will that has already chosen its work. The three little ones—strangled in the cellar with bands of exercise, while the husband was sent upon an errand—were not the issue of a passing vapour of the blood. They were the issue of that countenance. Nero made a theatre of his cruelties. This woman made a household of them, and then flung herself from the window as though the second fall might cancel the first. The body, now broken and confined to a chair, only confirms what the face declared at the outset.

Modern physicians would dissolve the whole into a catalogue of humours: the puerperal madness, the double-poled melancholy, the thirteen draughts of physic. I have heard such talk beside every scaffold and every ducking-stool. It never alters the bone. The criminal type, the witch-type, the type of the domestic destroyer—these are written in the orbit of the eye and the set of the jaw long before the deed. I have measured skulls at Newgate and faces in the assize-yard; I have seen the same sealed brow on the poisoner and the same dead lustre in the eye of the woman who smothered her own. The present age, ashamed of its own eyes, prefers the expert’s parchment to the testimony of Nature. Yet Nature does not adjourn. A hung jury is a pause in men’s proceedings. It is no pause in the reading of the face.

Let the district attorney determine whether the matter returns to another twelve. Let the woman remain at Tewksbury. The children are in the ground, and the profile remains. Physiognomy, which I have practised since the middle years of the last century upon every class of miscreant, is not subject to mistrial. The stigmata of this countenance will outlast the next hearing, the next learned witness, and the pink-clad company that gathers to pity what it will not see. I have spent my life upon such faces. This one is undefeated. It was so before the bands were drawn, and it will be so when the last of us is dust.

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