at street-corners, and talked together earnestly. Through Slopperton like wildfire spread the rumour of something, which had only been darkly hinted at the gaol.
The prisoner had destroyed himself!
Later in the afternoon it was known that he had bled himself to death by means of a lancet not bigger than a pin, which he had worn for years concealed in a chased gold ring of massive form and exquisite workmanship.
The gaoler had found him, at six o'clock on the morning after his trial, seated, with his bloodless face lying on the little table of his cell, white, tranquil, and dead.
The agents from an exhibition of wax-works, and several phrenologists, came to look at and to take casts of his head, and masks of the handsome and aristocratic face. One of the phrenologists, who had given an opinion on his cerebral development ten years before, when Mr. Jabez North was considered a model of all Sloppertonian virtues and graces, and who had been treated with ignominy for that very opinion, was now in the highest spirits, and introduced the whole story into a series of lectures, which were afterwards very popular. The Count de Marolles, with very long eyelashes, very small feet, and patent-leather boots, a faultless Stultsian evening costume, a white waistcoat, and any number of rings, was much admired in the Chamber of Horrors at the eminent wax-work exhibition above mentioned, and was considered well worth the extra sixpence for admission. Young ladies fell in love with him, and vowed that a being—they called him a being—with such dear blue glass eyes, with beautiful curly eyelashes, and specks of lovely vermilion in each corner, could never have committed a horrid murder, but was, no doubt, the innocent victim of that cruel circumstantial evidence. Mr. Splitters put the Count into a melodrama in four periods—not acts, but periods: 1. Boyhood—the Workhouse. 2. Youth—the School. 3. Manhood—the Palace. 4. Death—the Dungeon. This piece was very popular, and as Mr. Percy Cordonner had prophesied, the Count was represented as living en permanence in Hessian boots with gold tassels; and as always appearing, with a spirited disregard for the unities of time and space, two or three hundred miles distant from the spot in which he had appeared five minutes before, and performing in scene four the very action which his foes had described as being already done in scene three. But the transpontine audiences to whom the piece was represented were not in the habit of asking questions, and as long as you gave them plenty of Hessian boots and pistol-shots for their money, you might snap your fingers at Aristotle's ethics, and all the Greek dramatists into the bargain. What would they have cared for the classic school? Would they have given a
