With them was a large suspicious-looking bundle, which, when they had arrived at a spot suitable to their purpose, they lifted in their arms, placing their horrible burden,--for it was the body of a dead man,--where from their judgment and their knowledge of the tide, the corpse of their friend would be sought. Favoured by darkness and by night, they accomplished their object, again rowing rapidly down the stream to an obscure abode in the neighbourhood of Greenwich. When morning began to break, they returned once more to the place which had witnessed their mysterious midnight visit, where, with much apparent anxiety, they asked for tidings of their companion. The reply was what they expected. A body had been found,--it was that which they had placed on the strand,--and this they at once identified as that of the friend who had been with them in the boat, and for whom they had offered a reward. A coroner’s jury sate upon the remains, a verdict of accidental death was recorded, and the object of the conspirators fairly achieved. That object was to defraud an assurance office to a very large amount: for the missing man had not been drowned; the grief expressed was only simulated: and the body which had been placed on the banks of the Thames had been procured to consummate the deception. Against a fraud planned with so much art and carried out with such skill, no official regulation could guard; and when the papers containing the report of the inquest and the identity of the body, were forwarded to the office as the groundwork of a claim for the representative of the deceased, not a doubt could be entertained of its justice. It was true that the claimant under his will was his mistress; that his executors were the persons who perpetrated the fraud, and were with him at the time of the accident; but there were the broad and indisputable facts to be disposed of, that the insured man had met with a sudden and accidental death, and this was attested by the verdict of a jury. The money was paid, and with that portion of it which came to the deceased, he went to Paris. In that gay capital, with a mistress as expensive in her habits as himself, the cash was soon spent; and so successful had been the first attempt in this line, that it seemed a pity for gentlemen thus accomplished to abandon a mine so rich. Very shortly, therefore, after the previous fraud, an application was made from Liverpool to an office in London, to insure the life of a gentleman for 2000_l._ The applicant was represented as a commercial traveller, and permission was sought to extend the privilege of travelling to America. This insurance was effected, and when only a few months had elapsed, information was received by the company that the insured gentleman, while bathing in one of the large American lakes, had been drowned; that his clothes had been left on the banks of the water where his body had been found; and in verification