usually
came home in a compartment by himself, thus escaping observation, had
been murdered in the lane leading to his house. After robbing him, the
miscreants turned their thoughts towards the disposal of the body--a
subject that always occupies a first-class criminal mind before the
deed is done. They agreed to place it on the line, and have it mangled
by the Scotch Express, then nearly due. Before they got the body half-
way up the embankment the express came along and stopped. The guard got
out and walked along the other side to speak with the engineer. The
thought of putting the body into an empty first-class carriage
instantly occurred to the murderers. They opened the door with the
deceased's key. It is supposed that the pistol dropped when they were
hoisting the body in the carriage.

The Queen's evidence dodge didn't work, and Scotland Yard ignobly
insulted my friend Sherlaw Kombs by sending him a pass to see the
villains hanged.

DEATH COMETH SOON OR LATE.

It was Alick Robbins who named the invalid the Living Skeleton, and
probably remorse for having thus given him a title so descriptively
accurate, caused him to make friends with the Living Skeleton, a man
who seemed to have no friends.

Robbins never forgot their first conversation. It happened in this way.
It was the habit of the Living Skeleton to leave his hotel every
morning promptly at ten o'clock, if the sun was shining, and to shuffle
rather than walk down the gravel street to the avenue of palms. There,
picking out a seat on which the sun shone, the Living Skeleton would
sit down and seem to wait patiently for someone who never came. He wore
a shawl around his neck and a soft cloth cap on his skull. Every bone
in his face stood out against the skin, for there seemed to be no
flesh, and his clothes hung as loosely upon him as they would have upon
a skeleton. It required no second glance at the Living Skeleton to know
that the remainder of his life was numbered by days or hours, and not
by weeks or months. He didn't seem to have energy enough even to read,
and so it was that Robbins sat down one day on the bench beside him,
and said sympathetically:--

"I hope you are feeling better to-day."

The Skeleton turned towards him, laughed a low, noiseless, mirthless
laugh for a moment, and then said, in a hollow, far-away voice that had
no lungs behind it: "I am done with feeling either better or worse."

"Oh, I trust it is not so bad as th