"Ah! I see! I see! All the soap dishes in the house left filled last night and found filled this morning, captain?" "Good heavens! I don't know. What on earth can soap dishes have to do with it, man?" "Possibly nothing, probably a great deal--particularly if there's found to be a cake of soap in each. But that we can discover later. Now one word more. Was that same minute swelling--the mark like a gnat's bite--on the neck of the boy's body, too? And had it been on that of the mother's as well?" "I can't answer either question, Mr. Cleek. I don't remember to have heard about it being remarked in the case of Mrs. Comstock's death; and the murder of little Paul was such a horrible thing and so upset everybody that none of us thought to look." "An error of judgment that; however, it is one easily rectified, since the body is not yet interred," said Cleek. "Ever read Harvey's 'Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Sanguinis,' Captain?--the volume in which William Harvey first gave to the world at large his discovery regarding the circulation of the blood." "Good heavens, no! What would I be doing reading matters of that kind? I'm not a medico, Mr. Cleek--I'm a soldier." "I know. But, still--well, I thought it just possible that you might have read the work, or, at least, heard something regarding the contents of the volume. Men who have a hobby are rather given to riding it and boring other people with discussions and dissertations upon it; and I seem to think that I have heard it said that Sir Gilbert Morford's greatest desire in the time of his youth was to become a medical man. In fact, that he put in two or three years as a student at St. Bartholomew's, and would have qualified, but that the sudden death of his father compelled him to abandon the hope and to assume the responsibilities of the head of the house of Morford & Morford, tea importers, of Mincing Lane." "Yes; that's quite correct. He bitterly resented the compulsion--the 'pitchforking of a man out of a profession into the abomination of trade,' as he always expresses it--but of course, he was obliged to yield, and the 'dream of his life' dropped off into nothing but a dream. But the old love and the old recollection still linger, and, although he no longer personally follows either trade or profession, he keeps up his laboratory work, subscribes to every medical journal in Christendom, and if you want to tickle his vanity or to get on the right side of him all you have to do is to address him as 'doctor.' With all due respect to him, he's a bit of a prig, Mr. Cleek, and hates people of no position--'people of the lower order,' as he always terms them--as the gentleman down under is said to hate holy water."