With these meditations Dominicus Pike drove into the street of Parker’s Falls, which, as everybody knows, is as thriving a village as three cotton factories and a slitting-mill can make it. The machinery was not in motion, and but a few of the shop doors unbarred, when he alighted in the stable-yard of the tavern, and made it his first business to order the mare four quarts of oats. His second duty, of course, was to impart Mr. Higginbotham’s catastrophe to the ostler. He deemed it advisable, however, not to be too positive as to the date of the direful fact, and also to be uncertain whether it was perpetrated by an Irishman and a mulatto, or by the son of Erin alone. Neither did he profess to relate it on his own authority, or that of any other person; but mentioned it as a report generally diffused. The story ran through the town like fire among girdled trees, and became so much the universal talk that nobody could tell whence it originated. Mr. Higginbotham was as well known at Parker’s Falls as any citizen of the place, being part-owner of the slitting-mill, and a considerable stockholder in the cotton factories. The inhabitants felt their own prosperity interested in his fate. Such was the excitement that the _Parker’s Falls Gazette_ anticipated its regular day of publication, and came out with half a form of blank paper and a column of double pica emphasised with capitals, and headed HORRID MURDER OF MR. HIGGINBOTHAM! Among other dreadful details, the printed account described the mark of the cord round the dead man’s neck, and stated the number of thousand dollars of which he had been robbed. There was much pathos also about the affliction of his niece, who had gone from one fainting fit to another, ever since her uncle was found hanging on the St. Michael’s pear-tree with his pockets inside out. The village poet likewise commemorated the young lady’s grief in seventeen stanzas of a ballad. The select-men held a meeting, and in consideration of Mr. Higginbotham’s claims on the town, determined to issue handbills offering a reward of five hundred dollars for the apprehension of his murderers and the recovery of the stolen property.