at nobody could be found who
had ever seen him before. Indeed, it is hardly likely that he
could have been sleeping in any of the surrounding houses, for
the neighbourhood is a very good one, and the man had the appearance
of being a person of the labouring class."

"Any marks on the clothing or body?"

"Not one--beyond a tattooed heart on the left forearm, which caused
the coroner to come to the conclusion later that the man had at some
time been either a soldier or a sailor."

"Why?"

"The tattooing was evidently of foreign origin, he said, from
the skilful manner in which it had been performed and the brilliant
colour of the pigments used. Beyond that, the body bore no
blemish. The man had not been stabbed, he had not been shot, and a
post-mortem examination of the viscera proved conclusively that he
had not been poisoned. Neither had he been strangled, etherized,
drowned, or bludgeoned, for the brain was in no way injured and the
lungs were in a healthy condition. It was noticed, however, that the
passages of the throat and nose were unduly red, and that there was a
slightly distended condition of the bowels. This latter, however,
was set down by the physicians as the natural condition following
enteric, from which it was positive that the man had recently
suffered. They attributed the slightly inflamed condition of the
nasal passage and throat to his having either swallowed or snuffed
up something--camphor or something of that sort--to allay the
progress of the enteric, although even by analysis they were unable
to discover a trace of camphor or indeed of any foreign substance
whatsoever. The body was held in the public mortuary for several
days awaiting identification, but nobody came forward to claim it; so
it was eventually buried in the usual way and a verdict of 'Found
Dead' entered in the archives against the number given to it. The
matter had excited but little comment on the part of the public or
the newspapers, and would never have been recalled but for the
astonishing fact that just two nights after the burial a second man
was found under precisely similar circumstances--only that this
second man was clad in boots, undervest, and trousers. He was
found in a sort of gulley (down which, from the marks on the
side, he had evidently fallen), behind some furze bushes at a far
and little frequented part of the heath. An autopsy established
the fact that this man had died in a precisely similar manner to t