testimony of nothing that could properly and naturally attach itself to the murder. Cattle could not have done it, for they never were permitted in these woods, though a lad, who guarded a drove down on the pasture lands below the hill, was examined upon the idea that a madman had committed the deed in his frenzy, and he happened to be not of the sound order of brains. He was exempted from further suspicion, as well he might be. The spot on which she lay was the convexity of an abrupt whale-backed rock, running some fifteen feet east and west, and guarding any object at its base from the sight of persons passing along the road. Crumbled flints abounded thereabout, and a hard and cruel bed it was for a sleeper, dead or alive. When I first visited it there were no marks of so terrific a scene as must have been enacted in her killing, save the doubtful sapling that lay broken and prostrate; but above the spot where her piteous head had fallen, some pious visitor had placed a cross, with a card affixed, that informed the public of the name of the poor sufferer, and a prayer in her behalf. One week after the discovery of the body of the boy, the thick coppice and bushes that had concealed him were stripped away as memorials of the incident, and the ground about trampled by more than a thousand people; while the slimy mud oozed up as if eager to suck in more of the ghastly nutriment that had flown so freely in the first and final struggle of his death. IX. SUSPICION. As a matter of course, several arrests were made after the delivery of the verdict by the coroner, and rumor plied her busy trade with an increased variety of tones. Our rural neighborhood rose at once into the importance of a public spectacle; and full-orbed curiosity roved the highways, questioning all kinds of people with all kinds of interrogatories.