, he's real nice
looking, and I don't believe there's a mite of harm in him.

The early autumn night had now fallen and Grandma could not amuse
herself by watching the scenery. She bethought herself of the paper
Cyrus had given her and took it out of her basket. It was an old
weekly a fortnight back. On the first page was a long account of a
murder case with scare heads, and into this Grandma plunged eagerly.
Sweet old Grandma Sheldon, who would not have harmed a fly and hated
to see even a mousetrap set, simply revelled in the newspaper accounts
of murders. And the more shocking and cold-blooded they were, the more
eagerly did Grandma read of them.

This murder story was particularly good from Grandma's point of view;
it was full of "thrills." A man had been shot down, apparently in cold
blood, and his supposed murderer was still at large and had eluded all
the efforts of justice to capture him. His name was Mark Hartwell, and
he was described as a tall, fair man, with full auburn beard and
curly, light hair.

"What a shocking thing!" said Grandma aloud.

Her companion looked at her with a kindly, amused smile.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Why, this murder at Charlotteville," answered Grandma, forgetting, in
her excitement, that it was not safe to talk to people you meet on the
train. "It just makes my blood run cold to read about it. And to think
that the man who did it is still around the country somewhere--plotting
other murders, I haven't a doubt. What is the good of the police?"

"They're dull fellows," agreed the dark man.

"But I don't envy that man his conscience," said Grandma solemnly--and
somewhat inconsistently, in view of her statement about the other
murders that were being plotted. "What must a man feel like who has
the blood of a fellow creature on his hands? Depend upon it, his
punishment has begun already, caught or not."

"That is true," said the dark man quietly.

"Such a good-looking man too," said Grandma, looking wistfully at the
murderer's picture. "It doesn't seem possible that he can have killed
anybody. But the paper says there isn't a doubt."

"He is probably guilty," said the dark man, "but nothing is known of
his provocation. The affair may not have been so cold-blooded as the
accounts state. Those newspaper fellows never err on the side of
undercolouring."

"I really think," said Grandma slowly, "that I would like to see a
murderer--just one. Whenever I say anything like that