Coastdown woke lazily up from its slumbers with the dawn--not very early in January--and only got roused into life and activity by the startling piece of news that a shocking murder had been committed in the night. Hastening down to its alleged scene, the Half-moon beach, as many as heard it, shopkeepers, fishermen, and inhabitants generally, they found it to be too true. The poor man lay in the extreme corner of the strip of beach, right against the rocks, and was recognised for the late guest at the Red Court Farm, Robert Hunter. Not by his face; for that was disfigured beyond possibility of recognition; but by the clothes, hair, and appearance generally. He had been shot in the face, and, in falling from the heights above, the jagged edges of the rocks had also disfigured that poor face until not a trace of its humanity remained. The tide was low; it present the passage to the beach was passable, and stragglers were flocking up. The frosty air was crisp, the sea sparkled in the early morning sun. Amidst others came Justice Thornycroft, upright, portly, a smile on his handsome face. He did not believe the report; as was evident by his greeting words. "What's all this hullabaloo about a murder?" began he, as he shelved round the narrow ledge and put his foot upon the beach. "How d'ye do, Kyne?--How d'ye do, Copp--How d'ye do, all? When Martha brought up my shaving-water just now, she burst into my room, her hair and mouth all awry with a story of a man having been murdered in the night at the Half-moon. Some poor drowned fellow, I suppose, cast on the banks by the tide. What brings him so high up?" "I wish it was drowning, and nothing worse, for that's not such an uncivilized death, if it's your fate to meet it," returned Captain Copp, who was brisk this morning after his headache, and had stumped down on the first alarm. "It's a horrible land murder; nothing less; and upon a friend of yours, justice." "A friend of mine!" was the somewhat incredulous remark of Mr. Thornycroft. "Why, good Heaven!" he added, in an accent of horror, as the crowd parted and he caught sight of the body, "it is my late guest, Robert Hunter!" "It is indeed," murmured the crowd; and the justice stood gazing at it with horror as he took in the different points of recognition. The face was gone--that is the best term for one so utterly unrecognisable--but the appearance and dress were not to be mistaken. "He's buttoned close up in his fur coat, sir," one of the crowd remarked. Just so. He was buttoned up in his remarkable fur coat--as the village wrongly called it, for the coat was of white cloth, as we know, and its facings only of fur. It had stains on it now, neither white nor black, and one of its sleeves was torn, no doubt by the rocks. The hat was nowhere to be found: it never was found: but the natural supposition was, that in the fall it had rolled down to the lower beach, and been carried away by the tide.