Mrs. Grimes had come to tell us that the coroner was to be at the Spotted Dog at four o’clock, and to say that her husband hoped that we would be present. We had seen Mackenzie so lately, and had so much to do with the employment of the last days of his life, that we could not refuse this request, though it came accompanied by no legal summons. Then Mrs. Grimes again became voluble and poured out to us her biography of Mackenzie as far as she knew it. He had been married to the woman ten years, and certainly had been a drunkard before he married her. “As for her, she’d been well-nigh suckled on gin,” said Mrs. Grimes, “though he didn’t know it, poor fellow.” Whether this was true or not, she had certainly taken to drink soon after her marriage, and then his life had been passed in alternate fits of despondency and of desperate efforts to improve his own condition and that of his children. Mrs. Grimes declared to us that when the fit came on them,--when the woman had begun and the man had followed,--they would expend upon drink in two days what would have kept the family for a fortnight. “They say as how it was nothing for them to swallow forty shillings’ worth of gin in forty-eight hours.” The Doctor held up his hands in horror. “And it didn’t, none of it, come our way,” said Mrs. Grimes. “Indeed, John wouldn’t let us serve it for ’em.” She sat there for half an hour, and during the whole time she was telling us of the man’s life; but the reader will already have heard more than enough of it. By what immediate demon the woman had been instigated to burn the husband’s work almost immediately on its production within her own home, we never heard. Doubtless there had been some terrible scene in which the man’s sufferings must have been carried almost beyond endurance. “And he had feelings, Sir, he had,” said Mrs. Grimes; “he knew as a woman should be decent, and a man’s wife especial; I’m sure we pitied him so, John and I, that we could have cried over him. John would say a hard word to him at times, but he’d have walked round London to do him a good turn. John aint to say edicated hisself, but he do respect learning.”