However, as lawyers fight very hard, he recovered himself enough to
remark that there were no marks of violence before death, and insisted
on this being inserted in the magistrate's notes.

An inquest was ordered next day, and, meantime, Mrs. Gaunt was told she
could not quit the upper apartments of her own house. Two constables
were placed on the ground-floor night and day.

Next day the remains were removed to the little inn where Griffith had
spent so many jovial hours; laid on a table, and covered with a white
sheet.

The coroner's jury sat in the same room, and the evidence I have already
noticed was gone into, and the finding of the body deposed to. The jury,
without hesitation, returned a verdict of wilful murder.

Mrs. Gaunt was then brought in. She came, white as a ghost, leaning upon
Houseman's shoulder.

Upon her entering, a juryman, by a humane impulse, drew the sheet over
the remains again.

The coroner, according to the custom of the day, put a question to Mrs.
Gaunt, with the view of eliciting her guilt. If I remember right, he
asked her how she came to be out of doors so late on the night of the
murder. Mrs. Gaunt, however, was in no condition to answer queries. I
doubt if she even heard this one. Her lovely eyes, dilated with horror,
were fixed on that terrible sheet, with a stony glance. "Show me," she
gasped, "and let me die too."

The jurymen looked, with doubtful faces, at the coroner. He bowed a
grave assent.

The nearest juryman withdrew the sheet. The belief was not yet extinct
that the dead body shows some signs of its murderer's approach. So every
eye glanced on her and on It by turns; as she, with dilated,
horror-stricken eyes, looked on that awful Thing.

LONDON FORTY YEARS AGO.

FROM THE MEMORANDA OF A TRAVELLER.

The Court of Chancery.--Feeling a desire to see for myself the highest
embodiment of English law where it lurked--a huge and bloated
personification of all that was monstrous and discouraging to
suitors--in the secret place of thunder, just behind the altar of
sacrifice, forever spinning the web that for hundreds of years hath
enmeshed and overspread the mightiest empire upon earth with
entanglement, perplexity, and procrastination, till estates have
disappeared and families have died out, sometimes, while waiting for a
decision,--I dropped into the Court of Chancery.

The first thing I saw was the Lord Chancellor himself,--Lord Eldon,--the
mildest, wisest,