ched an age when radical changes do not seem
desirable. He was a man of fixed and regular habits, and his
regularity was of his own choice and not due to compulsion or
necessity. When last seen by his friends, as I shall prove, he was
proceeding to a definite destination with the expressed intention of
returning for purposes of his own appointing. He did return and then
vanished, leaving those purposes unachieved.

"If we conclude that he has voluntarily disappeared and is at present
in hiding, we adopt an opinion that is entirely at variance with all
these weighty facts. If, on the other hand, we conclude that he has
died suddenly, or has been killed by an accident or otherwise, we are
adopting a view that involves no inherent improbabilities and that is
entirely congruous with the known facts; facts that will be proved by
the testimony of the witnesses whom I shall call. The supposition that
the testator is dead is not only more probable than that he is alive; I
submit it is the only reasonable explanation of the circumstances of
his disappearance.

"But this is not all. The presumption of death which arises so
inevitably out of the mysterious and abrupt manner in which the
testator disappeared has recently received most conclusive and dreadful
confirmation. On the fifteenth of July last there were discovered at
Sidcup the remains of a human arm--a left arm, gentlemen, from the hand
of which the third, or ring, finger was missing. The doctor who has
examined that arm will tell you that the finger was cut off either
after death or immediately before; and his evidence will prove
conclusively that that arm must have been deposited in the place where
it was found just about the time when the testator disappeared. Since
that first discovery, other portions of the same mutilated body have
come to light; and it is a strange and significant fact that they have
all been found in the immediate neighborhood of Eltham or Woodford.
You will remember, gentlemen, that it was either at Eltham or Woodford
that the testator was last seen alive.

"And now observe the completeness of the coincidence. These human
remains, as you will be told presently by the experienced and learned
medical gentleman who has examined them most exhaustively, are those of
a man of about sixty years of age, about five feet eight inches in
height, fairly muscular and well preserved, apparently healthy, and
rather stoutly built. Another witness wi