to observe my proceedings with intelligent but highly
embarrassing interest.

The bones were laid out on a large table and covered with a sheet, which
the sergeant slowly turned back, watching my face intently as he did so
to note the impression that the spectacle made upon me. I imagine that
he must have been somewhat disappointed by my impassive demeanour, for
the remains suggested to me nothing more than a rather shabby set of
"student's osteology." The whole collection had been set out (by the
police-surgeon, as the sergeant informed me) in their proper anatomical
order; notwithstanding which I counted them over carefully to make sure
that none were missing, checking them by the list with which Thorndyke
had furnished me.

"I see you have found the left thigh-bone," I remarked, observing that
this did not appear in the list.

"Yes," said the sergeant; "that turned up yesterday evening in a big
pond called Baldwin's Pond in the Sand-pit plain, near Little Monk
Wood."

"Is that near here?" I asked.

"In the forest up Loughton way," was the reply.

I made a note of the fact (on which the sergeant looked as if he was
sorry he had mentioned it), and then turned my attention to a general
consideration of the bones before examining them in detail. Their
appearance would have been improved and examination facilitated by a
thorough scrubbing, for they were just as they had been taken from their
respective resting-places, and it was difficult to decide whether their
reddish-yellow colour was an actual stain or due to a deposit on the
surface. In any case, as it affected them all alike, I thought it an
interesting feature and made a note of it. They bore numerous traces of
their sojourn in the various ponds from which they had been recovered,
but these gave me little help in determining the length of time during
which they had been submerged. They were, of course, encrusted with mud,
and little wisps of pond-weed stuck to them in places; but these facts
furnished only the vaguest measure of time.

Some of the traces were, indeed, more informing. To several of the
bones, for instance, there adhered the dried egg-clusters of the common
pond-snail, and in one of the hollows of the right shoulder-blade (the
"infra-spinous fossa") was a group of the mud-built tubes of the red
river-worm. These remains gave proof of a considerable period of
submersion, and since they could not have been deposited on the bones
until all the