had caused a greater excitement than the killing of Mr. Lincoln. I could well understand that,—for the one was in its chief features, a political event, while the other appealed to the commonest sensations of our nature, through the avenues of mystery. On one Sunday alone, I was told by one of the rural officers, that more than twelve hundred people, men, women, and children, had visited the blood-stained places of the murders. One great misfortune was inevitable from this sudden and continued irruption, and that was the total extinction of any foot-track of the murderer, or any vestige of his garments which might have been torn from him in the struggles with the stronger girl, or the conjectured chase he made in pursuit of the fleeing boy; for strange it was, that the bodies were found separated by several hundred yards of distance, an interval of dense wood and shrubbery closing in in all directions.[1] The one, as I said before, was killed on the summit of the hill; the other, at its base. As strict an examination as it was possible to effect was instituted, by the police authorities, of all the paths leading to the two spots of deepest interest, of every brake and shaded place; and very useless was it soon found to be in the vicinity of the death-scene of the girl,—for there the ground was dry and rocky; but where the boy was found the soil was moist, and had not the paths been constantly travelled over during that silent week and afterward, it was there that some clue might have been found, the footsteps of the assassin evident, kept there by that inscrutable and puzzling fatality that frequently attends on such events. The party of discovery, however, not having the police presence of mind at the moment when they came upon the desolate object, obliterated, by an unconscious complicity with the assassin, and demolished, in their eager rush, any marks he might have left; for at least to that body no one had approached, and the footmarks of the only living witness and actor must have kept company with the bloody corpse throughout that interval. Thus everything tended to shield the doer of the deed. The dry ground and flints around the girl; the very solitude of the boy’s last asylum, to whose protection he had fled with the breath of his pursuer hot upon him; the rain that fell afterward, and that fatal week’s concealment,—gave him ample time to perfect his plan of evasion; and well did the demon use his opportunities; for, up to this moment, the public is in possession of no clue by which he can be brought to the expiation, if human expiation be possible, of his unparalleled offence. Whatever may be known to the mysterious agent of legal vindication, the keen-eyed chief, we cannot discover; possibly there is nothing to discover, though I do not agree to that; he may be waiting for one of those redressing incidents by which the chain of evidence is united,—incidents simple of themselves and reaching forward out of