"Plainly stated, the facts are these:--A house is taken by a man who calls himself by the, to us, obviously false name of Francis Hain. Beyond the fact that he wore a pair of smoked-glass spectacles, there appears to have been little about him to cause remark. The payment of a quarter's rent in advance appears to have answered satisfactorily those questions which the landlord would otherwise surely have felt it incumbent upon him to ask; at all events, the usual formalities with respect to references were in this case entirely dispensed with. Ostensibly, the house was rented with the object of carrying out certain experiments of a scientific nature. A nameless woman, calling herself the housekeeper, is the active agent between Mr. Hain, so called, and the local tradesmen. Observe, the butcher and the baker see no one but this woman; they neither of them see the tenant of 64A or the deceased. By chance a domestic servant sees both, but naturally enough takes small notice of either. Up to June 26th the housekeeper herself receives the food from the tradesmen, and pays them for it in cash. This, of itself, might or might not be indicative of a preconceived intention to leave the house suddenly. After the 26th the housekeeper is seen no more, and on the 28th the house is broken into, and the dead man's body is discovered. The medical evidence goes to prove that he was done to death on the 26th, and it is from that day also that we lose sight of Mr. Hain. Both tenant and housekeeper vanish as completely as if the earth had swallowed them up. Thus we are deprived of the only two persons who at this time seem to have had any connection with the dead man. Their disappearance, coincident as it is, of itself arouses suspicion. Moreover, by the careful removal of all marks from the linen of the deceased, we are left without what otherwise might have lent an important clue to his identity.