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A NOTABLE CRIMINAL TRIAL. IT will scarcely be credited, at first hearing of the statement, that the writer has either drawn or, after inspection, approved, during the course of a professionally official career as prosecutor of criminal pleas, over fifteen thousand indictments in the course of a fifteen years' official experience, and has as sisted in at least ten thousand trials; which experience will entitle him to credence when he pronounces the cause celebre which is the topic of this article the most interesting one that came within the scope of his observa tion or participation. It was known to the newspapers all over the Union, and through them to a vast clientele of readers, as the Chemical Bank forgery case. This financial institution, situated in New York, in a modest little brown stone building on Broadway, opposite the city hall and court house — and since towered over by pretentious sky scrapers — boasts the highest value to stock known to any corporation in the world. In this 189/, each of its original hundred dollar shares sells for over two thousand dollars. During the Civil War, and when gold was at an enormous premium, the Chemical Bank never refused to redeem in the precious metal, when offered, any out standing of their bills, long since now ceased to be issued. Its officers, from highest to lowest, have always been of the shrewdest; and yet, in the summer of 1854, that bank was made the victim of the most ingenious criminal obtaining of money, even yet, nearly half a century later, known to New York's financial circles. Not many months prior to that date news paper readers had been made sensationally acquainted with the details of a trial before that great judge of the Federal Supreme Court, John McLean, sitting at nisi prius, in Ohio, wherein William Kissane and Lyman

Cole were arraigned as conspirators, with three others for attempting to defraud certain fire insurance companies by incendiarily destroying an Ohio River steamboat falsely laden with a variety of alleged valuable but sham merchandise much over-insured. Apart from the boldness of the crime the trial became notable from the array of coun sel engaged, among whom was one who afterwards became a candidate for vicepresident and an ambassador; another who later ascended the bench of the Supreme Court at Washington, a third who was an ex-State governor, and others who were respectively a cabinet sec retary or a Federal attorney-general, and a leading counsel for the defense of an im peached president of the United States. Throughout four weeks there was a daily contention of legal wits over novel and complicated legal questions, but all only to the simple ending of an acquittal. The Ohio case was popularly known as the Martha Washington case, because that re vered name was on the paddle-wheels of the burned steamboat. Freed from criminal danger in the matter, their jury to a moral certainty unduly influenced in their favor, Kissane and Cole — still cute as moths hovering around a candle-flame with previously singed wings — hastened to engage in a new criminal enterprise as daring and ingenious as had been the Martha Washington conspiracy. In this second criminal design they enlisted James Findlay, a broken-down commercial man of Cincinnati, who possessed a small cash capital of two thousand dollars, needful to initiate the contemplated fraud which was to involve complicated forgery and false personation. Westward their star of imperial criminality began its way under many con