No wonder the Committee of the House of Commons embodied this paragraph in their report: "It is a most important duty of society to guard its members against foul play, and it appears to your Committee that so far as may be it should be made impossible for any person to disappear from his place in the community without any satisfactory evidence being obtained of the cause of his disappearance." ***** All the people who disappear and are never heard of again do not start fresh lives. Many of them are without the means to do so. Some have probably committed suicide. All the people who quietly drop into the Thames do not come to the surface again. Something may happen to prevent the body rising. But for a suicide to remain long a mystery is the exception, not the rule. The suicide does not go out of the way to take precautions against the discovery of the deed. The average person bent on suicide more frequently desires the sympathy which will follow the discovery of the tragedy. As a matter of fact, romance and crime divide the mysterious disappearances fairly between them, and if there is a balance either way it is in favour of crime. The person who remains alive after disappearing has a task of the greatest difficulty in these days of photography and illustrated journalism. The odds against being able to avoid discovery are enormous. It is only the dead and buried who are safely out of the way of prying eyes. And yet there are cases on record of people who have disappeared and been completely lost to their relatives who have never moved five miles away from their home. James Ferguson, the famous astronomer, was walking one day in the Strand with his daughter. They stopped together to look in a shop window. When Mr. Ferguson moved on to renew his walk, his daughter was nowhere to be seen. Her fate was a mystery which was only solved long years afterwards when she was discovered dying in a room in a court not many yards from the spot at which she had disappeared. She had slipped away from her father to meet a lover, and with him she had eloped. He deserted her, and the unhappy girl, after trying to be an actress, and trying to be an authoress, sank to the lowest level, and for three years before she was found dying she had haunted the Strand and had often at night encountered friends and relatives who had not recognized her. Some years ago, in Bermondsey Workhouse, two old paupers who had been fellow-inmates of the house for fifteen years fell into conversation over their afternoon pipes. They became reminiscent. "Ah!" said one, "my mother lived in that street"--alluding to one that was then being pulled down. "She was a widow, and I and my brother helped in the shop. One day my brother disappeared. He was seventeen. He went out and we never saw him again--never knew what happened to him." "He helped your mother in a shop in that street," said the other pauper. "What sort of a shop?"