Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Rory OConor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by Cornell University Digital Collections) Appletons' Town and Country Library No. 191 CHRONICLES OF MARTIN HEWITT BY ARTHUR MORRISON AUTHOR OF TALES OF MEAN STREETS, ETC. [Illustration] NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1896 COPYRIGHT, 1895, 1896, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. CONTENTS. PAGE THE IVY COTTAGE MYSTERY 1 THE NICOBAR BULLION CASE 42 THE HOLFORD WILL CASE 94 THE CASE OF THE MISSING HAND 138 THE CASE OF LAKER, ABSCONDED 187 THE CASE OF THE LOST FOREIGNER 228 CHRONICLES OF MARTIN HEWITT. THE IVY COTTAGE MYSTERY. I had been working double tides for a month: at night on my morning paper, as usual; and in the morning on an evening paper as _locum tenens_ for another man who was taking a holiday. This was an exhausting plan of work, although it only actually involved some six hours' attendance a day, or less, at the two offices. I turned up at the headquarters of my own paper at ten in the evening, and by the time I had seen the editor, selected a subject, written my leader, corrected the slips, chatted, smoked, and so on, and cleared off, it was very usually one o'clock. This meant bed at two, or even three, after supper at the club. This was all very well at ordinary periods, when any time in the morning would do for rising, but when I had to be up again soon after seven, and round at the evening paper office by eight, I naturally felt a little worn and disgusted with things by midday, after a sharp couple of hours' leaderette scribbling and paragraphing, with attendant sundries. But the strain was over, and on the first day of comparative comfort I indulged in a midday breakfast and the first undisgusted glance at a morning paper for a month. I felt rather interested in an inquest, begun the day before, on the body of a man whom I had known very slightly before I took to living in chambers. His name was Gavin Kingscote, and he was an artist of a casual and desultory sort, having, I believe, some small private means of his own. As a matter of fact, he had boarded in the same house in which I had lodged myself for a while, but as I was at the time a late homer and a fairly early riser, taking no regular board in the house, we never became much acquainted. He had since, I understood, made some judicious Stock Exchange speculations, and had set up house in Finchley.