Sometimes the identity of the dead upon whom the curious or the anxious come to gaze is violently disputed. Not long since two women claimed one man as a missing husband, and in the end it was proved that he belonged to neither of them. Yet both recognized the features and the clothes, and both gave certain indications as to marks which were found to exist on the body. Only those who have official knowledge of the number of people who come to identify a body "found drowned" are aware of the vast number of men and women who leave their homes and make no communication to their relatives as to their whereabouts. And these people are not always of the poorest class. Here lay some time ago a man done to death--a foreigner shot in the streets of London. The man had been tracked by an assassin sent by a secret society from his native land. The society's agent came to London with orders to shoot the condemned man on sight. Soon after the news of the crime got into the papers, two men of the victim's own nationality came to the mortuary to see if they could identify him. One glance was sufficient. As they turned shuddering away, one muttered to the other, "This fate is for us, too; we shall be the next." A few days later those men met their doom, and came to lie side by side with the first victim. The murderer being eventually discovered in the neighbourhood, and brought to bay, shot himself as he was on the point of being arrested. He was brought to this mortuary, too, and made up a gruesome quartette. This tragedy of vengeance, as thrilling as any story that is told of the Italian Vendetta or the Russian Terrorism, happened in a quiet London suburb. These people lived in modest apartments, without a vestige of romance about them to suggest to the landlady, or the servant girl who waited on them, that they were men whose death-sentence had been pronounced by the committee of a secret society in Eastern Europe, and that one by one they were to fall to the pistol-shot of the man who had drawn the lot which made him their executioner. It reads like a page tom from a wildly sensational story. It happened in a popular London suburb, among the trams and 'buses, the crowded streets and the busy shops. A portion of the truth was told in the court of the coroner, a good deal that lay behind the tragedy was imagined; but there were elements of mystery in this romance of the East, transplanted to the West, which yet remain to be solved. Year in, year out, all days of the week, the mysteries of life and death come to this building of sad significance. At the iron gate that shuts it off from the roadway the mortuary-keeper stood one summer evening. A young workman came along the street whistling. It was the young fellow's wont as he passed every evening on his way home to exchange greeting with the mortuary-keeper if he happened to be at the gate. His greeting was generally a grim joke: "All right, John," he used to say, "I'm not coming in just yet."