under circumstances, to say the very least, of a black and
suspicious appearance. The county coroner had got a jury of the
neighbours impanelled together; who, after sitting patiently on the
inquest, and hearing, as well as seeing, the following evidence, could
arrive at no verdict more specific than the obvious fact, that the poor
old creature had been "found dead." The great question lay between
apoplexy and murder; and the evidence tended to a well-matched conflict
of opinions.

First, there lay the body, quietly in bed, tucked in tidily and
undisturbed, with no marks of struggling, none whatever--the clothes lay
smooth, and the chamber orderly: yet the corpse's face was of a purple
hue, the tongue swollen, the eyes starting from their sockets: it might,
indeed, possibly have been an apoplectic seizure, which took her in her
sleep, and killed her as she lay; _but_ that the gripe of clutching
fingers had left their livid seals upon the throat, and countenanced
the dreadful thought of strangulation!

Secondly, a surgeon (one Mr. Eager, the Union doctor, a very young
personage, wrong withal and radical) maintained that this actual
strangulation might have been effected by the hands of the deceased
herself, in the paroxysm of a rush of blood to the brain; and he
fortified his wise position by the instance of a late statesman, who, he
averred, cut his throat with a pen-knife, to relieve himself of pressure
on the temples: while another surgeon--Stephen Cramp, he was farrier as
well, and had been, until lately, time out of mind, the village
AEsculapius, who looked with scorn on his pert rival, and opposed him
tooth and nail on all occasions--insisted that it was not only
physically impossible for poor Mrs. Quarles so to have strangled
herself, but more particularly that, if she had done so, she certainly
could not have laid herself out so decently afterwards; therefore, that
as some one else had kindly done the latter office for her, why not the
former too?

Thirdly, Sarah Stack, the still-room maid, deposed, that Mrs. Quarles
always locked her door before she went to bed, but that when she
(deponent) went to call her as usual on the fatal morning, the door was
just ajar; and so she found her dead: while parallel with this, tending
to implicate some domestic criminal, was to be placed the equally
uncommon fact, that the other door of Mrs. Quarles's room, leading to
the lawn, was open too:--be it known that Mrs. Quarles