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. Bell had been doing her own work for several months and taking in fine sewing. But ambitious newspaper reporters bent themselves to this new task, as is their custom in all matters of public concern, _i. e._, to outrival the most noted expert in the line of that particular phase of public endeavor uppermost at the time. Theories were advanced in the daily papers that made Sherlock Holmes seem like a novice in detective work and Lucretia Borgia a mere infant in the skillful administration of poisons. The regular detectives, both public and private, were aroused by the mystery that shrouded the case. It remained, however, for the ubiquitous reporter, to whom society really owes a debt along every line of worthy public endeavor impossible either to estimate or discharge, to discover that the handwriting on the box was that of Dr. John Earl, and that he had been in the habit, for months, of paying almost daily visits to the Bell home; that he was at Magnolia Beach, but a short ride from Boston, at the time the package was mailed there; that ostensibly he had visited the Bell home to attend the little girl who was injured by the automobile, but that the mother was undoubtedly much interested in him; that there were many rumors among surgeons that his operation on the leg of the child had produced tuberculosis; that the district attorney had received anonymous letters to the effect that Earl had deliberately attempted to poison both mother and daughter, to be rid of an unpleasant _liaison_ on the one hand and the evidence of his lack of skill on the other; that the child had gone to the country after he left the city and he still supposed her with her mother, hence the saving of the child's life; that the box of candied fruit was only a blind, and that some other package must have arrived containing the poison in another form, possibly in the same wrapping paper with the fruit; that no possible motive could be discovered for the poisoning by any other person and no clue could be found leading to a suspicion of any one else. With five hundred thousand visitors constantly within the gates of their city; with a shifting population of nearly a million more; with permanent residents absorbed in the most strenuous existence known on the American Continent; with sensation in high life of such frequent occurrence as to benumb any effort to form a discriminating opinion--the people of New York (visitors, temporary denizens, those
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