This was beyond all question the most imprudent of all the acts of these terrible beings. Without supposing them mad, it is hardly possible to imagine that they could place before young men of the College, who were in the daily habit of conversing with their victim, a body which could scarcely fail to be recognised upon the instant. Yet on that very day it was put into a chest and conveyed to the rooms, where, _after examination_, it brought the price of £10. Burke, when he rose up after being satisfied that Jamie was dead, rifled his pockets, and took out the small box and the spoon, giving the spoon to Hare, and keeping the box to himself. The clothes he gave to his brothers children, who, when the bundle was unbound, fell to fighting about them; connected with which part of an atrocity which the paper will scarcely bear the impression of, is the curious fact that a baker some time after recognised upon one of Constantine Burke's sons a pair of trousers he had not long before given to Jamie. But here, again, though the mother of the lad, distracted by his sudden disappearance, ran about searching and inquiring everywhere for her poor boy, and though it was circulated that one of Dr Knox's students had affirmed that he saw Jamie on the dissecting-table, no suspicion of the manner in which he had been disposed of was ever hinted, till the final discovery, which arose out of another case. Yet it is certain that even before this event there had begun to move an under-current of uneasiness in the public mind, and even some dark hints appeared in the public prints; not that any of these pointed to anything of a defined character, but that they gradually gave rise to a suspicion that there was some great secret to be unfolded--what, no one could tell, no one even surmise--which would startle the public ear, and lay open some terrible conspiracy. Theories flew about in various guises, all as dark as they were ridiculous. Some said that there existed somewhere in the city a secret association of men, bound together by a fearful oath to avenge fancied wrongs by a crusade against society, and that the members prowled about at night for their victims, which they immolated amidst oaths and curses. Others, still more wild, whispered that the missing individuals were slaughtered and eaten by a gang of famished wretches, who having once tasted human flesh, got keen upon the zest. Sawney Bean and Christie of the Cleik rose up again, and became what they had been in olden times, the bugbears of grown children. And, however ridiculous all these fancies might appear after the disclosure of the true secret, it cannot be denied that even sensible people, who looked sharply into human nature, and were not utterly sceptical of the old legends, might, without the charge of being fanciful, be led into thoughts which they would otherwise have been ashamed of. The fact that so many individuals, old and young, had