a tremendous amount
of acrimonious discussion on both sides of the Atlantic. My own
contribution to the controversy consisted in pointing out that the whole
dispute was beside the mark, as the actual murderer had not yet been
captured; but I soon discovered that on this point there was not the
least divergence of public or expert opinion. I had looked forward
apprehensively to the proving of my identity and the establishment of my
motives as a disagreeable necessity; I speedily found out that the most
disagreeable part of the business was that it couldn't be done. When I
saw in the glass the haggard and hunted expression which the experiences
of the past few weeks had stamped on my erstwhile placid countenance, I
could scarcely feel surprised that the few friends and relations I
possessed refused to recognise me in my altered guise, and persisted in
their obstinate but widely shared belief that it was I who had been done
to death on the highway. To make matters worse, infinitely worse, an
aunt of the really murdered man, an appalling female of an obviously low
order of intelligence, identified me as her nephew, and gave the
authorities a lurid account of my depraved youth and of her laudable but
unavailing efforts to spank me into a better way. I believe it was even
proposed to search me for fingerprints."

"But," said the Chaplain, "surely your educational attainments--"

"That was just the crucial point," said the condemned; "that was where my
lack of specialisation told so fatally against me. The dead
Salvationist, whose identity I had so lightly and so disastrously
adopted, had possessed a veneer of cheap modern education. It should
have been easy to demonstrate that my learning was on altogether another
plane to his, but in my nervousness I bungled miserably over test after
test that was put to me. The little French I had ever known deserted me;
I could not render a simple phrase about the gooseberry of the gardener
into that language, because I had forgotten the French for gooseberry."

The Chaplain again wriggled uneasily in his seat. "And then," resumed
the condemned, "came the final discomfiture. In our village we had a
modest little debating club, and I remembered having promised, chiefly, I
suppose, to please and impress the doctor's wife, to give a sketchy kind
of lecture on the Balkan Crisis. I had relied on being able to get up my
facts from one or two standard works, and the back-numbers of c