It should be looked into, for the crime grows appallingly common. But a female is too often at the bottom of it. My uncle exhibited the utmost bitterness when his wife ran away from him. 'Women are all alike,' he said to me; and when a man says that, you know his luck has been to meet the exception. Never did Norman Norcot touch upon the deed in his mind, however, though Parson Haymes has since told me that upon one occasion he found it his duty severely to reprove my uncle for ideas favourable and lenient to suicide. "To resume, he threw off dull care, as I fondly supposed, and went to the Moor for a day's holiday along with me. I took my man, Reginald Mason; while a lad accompanied my uncle. Our plan was that I should fish the River Teign where it runs into the central vastness of the Moor beneath Sittaford Tor; while he proposed to shoot up the valley of the little Wallabrook, a stream that rises in the marshes beneath Wattern and joins the Teign near Scorhill. We were to meet at a lone dwelling by Teign Head, where lives a shepherd. There we designed to take luncheon; and my sister Gertrude had packed a goodly basket with such delicacies as we knew that our uncle most esteemed. There was a bottle of French burgundy at my order. ''Tis bad for him,' said Gertrude. 'I know it,' I replied, 'but 'twill do him no hurt for once after hard exercise.' "Mason left me at the junction of Teign and Wallabrook, and proceeded up the river to the place where we were to lunch three hours later. The boy, with uncle's great red dog and little black spaniel, went up to the head of the lesser stream, for he told this lad to work down towards him, and drive any birds that might rise into the lower reaches of the river. This plan Uncle Norman proposed, and I wondered at the time that he should make arrangements so unusual. For myself, I set up my rod and was a little impatient to get at the trout, for there chanced to be a good morning rise. But my uncle desired me to stop with him for a while, and of course I did so. "At last we parted, and he made no ado about leave-taking, but compared his timepiece with mine and promised to be punctual at the luncheon tryst. I wetted my fly and had moved a hundred yards when he called me back and asked me for some string. 'My bootlace has broken,' he said. I had no such thing upon me, but cut off a yard of my line; then restored the cast of flies and left him apparently putting his boot in order. I never saw him again alive. When I had reached what I call 'the pool,' where Teign lies in long, still reaches between two waterfalls, I thought that I heard the faint report of a gun; and I smiled with satisfaction, little dreaming what had occurred.