Thank God, they did not want me at the inquest. The verdict given--with the doctor, the policeman, and two persons from the place where she worked, for witnesses--was Accidental Death. The end of the cravat was produced, and the coroner said that it was certainly enough to suggest suspicion; but the jury, in the absence of any positive evidence, held to the doctor’s notion that she had fainted and fallen down, and so got the blow on her temple. They reproved the people where Mary worked for letting her go home alone, without so much as a drop of brandy to support her, after she had fallen into a swoon from exhaustion before their eyes. The coroner added, on his own account, that he thought the reproof was thoroughly deserved. After that, the cravat-end was given back to me, by my own desire; the police saying that they could make no investigations with such a slight clue to guide them. They may think so, and the coroner, and doctor, and jury may think so; but, in spite of all that has passed, I am now more firmly persuaded than ever that there is some dreadful mystery in connection with that blow on my poor lost Mary’s temple which has yet to be revealed, and which may come to be discovered through this very fragment of a cravat that I found in her hand. I cannot give any good reason for why I think so; but I know that if I had been one of the jury at the inquest, nothing should have induced me to consent to such a verdict as Accidental Death. BIRD HISTORY. A certain learned physician, named Peter Belon, a native of the town of Le Mans, the capital of what was then the province of Maine, but is now the department of the river Sarthe, in France, bethought him that very little was known in his native country at the time he lived--the middle of the sixteenth century--of Natural History; and, being moved by the example of Aristotle (at the trifling distance of nearly nineteen hundred years) he resolved, having been a great traveller and eke a great observer (two persons not always united) to give his fellow-citizens and the world, the benefit of his experience and opportunities, and take away the reproach which lay like a shadow over the land.