From time to time there had been murders committed in London with details dismal and sordid enough to satisfy the most rabid appetites, but it was generally admitted that the great Catchpole Square Mystery outvied them all in just those elements of attraction which render crime so weirdly fascinating to the British public. Men and women in North Islington experienced a feeling akin to that which the bestowal of an unexpected dignity confers, and when they retired to bed were more than ordinarily careful about the fastening of locks and bolts. Timid wives woke in the middle of the night, and tremblingly asked their husbands whether they did not hear somebody creeping in the passages, and many a single woman shivered in her bed. Shopkeepers standing behind their counters bristled with it; blue-aproned butchers, knife in hand, called out their "Buy, buy, buy!" with a brisk and cheery ring; crossing sweepers touched their hats smartly to their patrons, and preceding them with the unnecessary broom as they swept nothing away, murmured the latest rumour; the lamplighters, usually a sad race, lighted the street lamps with unwonted alacrity; and the Saturday night beggars took their stands below the kerb in hopeful anticipation of a spurt in benevolence. Naturally it formed the staple news in the newspapers on Sunday and Monday, and all agreed that the excitement it had created was unparallelled in the records of the criminal calendar. "On Saturday evening," said "The Little Busy Bee" in its Monday's editions, "numbers of people wended their way to Catchpole Square from every part of the metropolis. Up till late the usually quiet streets resembled a Saturday night market, and there was an extraordinary demand for the literature of crime, with which the vendors of second-hand books had provided themselves. Towards midnight the human tide slackened, but even during the early hours of the morning there were many fresh arrivals. On Sunday the excitement was renewed, and it is calculated that seven or eight thousand persons must have visited the Square in the course of the day, many of whom seemed to regard the occasion as a picnic.