people before and since my arrival in England, have assumed the
authorship of the book to themselves; and one gentleman went so far as
to declare that he would shoot me if I claimed to have written it. I am
glad to say that up to the present he has not carried out his
intention. Another individual had his cards printed, "Fergus Hume.
Author of 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab,'" and also added the price for
which he was prepared to write a similar book. Many of the papers put
this last piece of eccentricity down to my account.

I may state in conclusion, that I belong to New Zealand, and not to
Australia, that I am a barrister, and not a retired policeman, that I
am yet two decades off fifty years of age, that Fergus Hume is my real
name, and not a nom-de-plume; and finally, that far from making a
fortune out of the book, all I received for the English and American
rights, previous to the issue of this Revised Edition by my present
publishers, was the sum of fifty pounds. With this I take my leave, and
I trust that the present edition may prove as successful as did the
first.

CHAPTER I.

WHAT THE ARGUS SAID.

The following report appeared in the Argus newspaper of Saturday, the
28th July, 18--

"Truth is said to be stranger than fiction, and certainly the
extraordinary murder which took place in Melbourne on Thursday night,
or rather Friday morning, goes a long way towards verifying this
saying. A crime has been committed by an unknown assassin, within a
short distance of the principal streets of this great city, and is
surrounded by an inpenetrable mystery. Indeed, from the nature of the
crime itself, the place where it was committed, and the fact that the
assassin has escaped without leaving a trace behind him, it would seem
as though the case itself had been taken bodily from one of Gaboreau's
novels, and that his famous detective Lecoq alone would be able to
unravel it. The facts of the case are simply these:--

"On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to
two o'clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station
in Grey Street, St. Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement
that his cab contained the body of a man who he had reason to believe
had been murdered. Being taken into the presence of the inspector, the
cabman, who gave his name as Malcolm Royston, related the following
strange story:--

"At the hour of one o'clock in the morning, he was driving