R. Austin Freeman

“ The plain-clothes man proceeded at once to act on my suggestion, taking the sieve with him to save time. And sure enough, after filling it twice with the mud from the bottom of the pool, the entire skeleton of the foot was brought to light.
"Now you're happy, I suppose," said the inspector when I had checked the bones and found them all present.
"I should be more happy," I replied, "if I knew what you were searching for in this pond. You weren't looking for the foot, were you?"
"I was looking for anything that I might find," he answered. "I shall go on searching until we have the whole body. ”

“ Are there any more bones in that bag?"
"No, sir," replied the laborer, wiping his hands with an air of finality on the posterior aspect of his trousers; "that's the lot."
The surgeon looked thoughtfully at the bones as he gave a final touch to their arrangement, and remarked:
"The inspector is right. All the bones of the neck are there. Very odd. Don't you think so?" ”

“ Those few days of companionable labor in the reading-room, with the homely hospitalities of the milk-shop and the pleasant walks homeward through the friendly London streets, had called into existence a new world—a world in which the gracious personality of Ruth Bellingham was the one dominating reality. ”

“ Any remains that we discover will be deposited in the mortuary, where you can inspect them to your heart's content; but you can't stay here and watch us."
I had no defined object in keeping a watch on the inspector's proceedings; but the sergeant's indiscreet hint had aroused my curiosity, which was further excited by Mr. Badger's evident desire to get rid of me. Moreover, while we had been talking, the pump had stopped (the muddy floor of the pond being now pretty fully exposed) , and the inspector's assistant was handling the shovel impatiently. ”

“ To the urban workman—the journeyman baker or tailor, for instance, laboring year in year out in a single building—a holiday ramble on Hampstead Heath is a veritable voyage of discovery; whereas to the sailor the shifting panorama of the whole wide world is but the commonplace of the day's work. ”

“ Marchmont had obtained, and which the sergeant read with his back against the wall, to prevent the newspaper men from looking over his shoulder.
My credentials being found satisfactory, the door was unlocked and I entered, accompanied by three enterprising reporters, whom, however, the sergeant summarily ejected and locked out, returning to usher me into the presence and to observe my proceedings with intelligent but highly embarrassing interest. ”

“ There is nothing particularly characteristic about a finger, or, at least, the bones of one; and the object of the present researches was to determine the identity of the person of whom these bones were the remains. There was something mysterious about the affair, something suggesting that Inspector Badger was in possession of private information of some kind. ”

“ These were my instructions, and, considering that I was going merely to inspect a few dry bones, they appeared rather formidable; in fact, the more I read them over the greater became my misgivings as to my qualifications for the task.
As I approached the mortuary it became evident that some, at least, of Thorndyke's admonitions were by no means unnecessary. The place was in charge of a police sergeant, who watched my approach suspiciously; and some half-dozen men, obviously newspaper reporters, hovered about the entrance like a pack of jackals. I presented the coroner's order which Mr. ”