he coroner's inquests there was nothing to
be seen there either. The mother had probably been too distressed with
grief to observe the substitution, or too anxious not to lose her
passage to stop to make inquiries if she had had any
suspicion--teething convulsions are not at all uncommon among children
of that age, and a stranger in London was likely to get no redress
under such circumstances, even if she had the courage to attempt it
There was so little likely motive for any one to take away a living
child and leave a dead one, that she was sure to have been laughed to
scorn if she had suggested such a thing to the landlady of the house.

Francis, disappointed in the newspapers, next went to the
lodging-house, but it had been pulled down and another substituted in
its place, and of course no one could tell anything about the obscure
woman who had kept it. A London Directory for 18--gave her name as Mrs.
Martha Stubbs, which did not agree with the name which Mrs. Peck
reported, which was Mrs. Dawson. This was a bad beginning to his search
for corroborative evidence; but he put an advertisement in the TIMES
and WEEKLY DISPATCH for her under both names, in hopes that she might
recollect something about a child dying in convulsions in her house, in
the absence of its mother, just before a lodger left her house to go to
Sydney with another child of the same sex and age. This, after a lapse
of thirty-five years, was a desperate chance, but it was the only
course open to Francis, and he took it.

Next he went to Edinburgh and inquired in New Street, in the old town,
for the woman, Violet Strachan, who had let the lodgings where the real
Francis Hogarth was born, and where the irregular marriage had also
taken place. Thirty-five years in a city like Edinburgh, with an
eminently migrating population, is a far more unmanageable period than
in a country town, where people inhabit the same houses from one
generation to another, and where, even if the persons whom you wish to
discover are dead, there are neighbours who recollect about them. This
second search was fruitless, so he could only advertise for Violet
Strachan, and that he also did.

Next he went to his friend Sinclair, and opened his budget of news to
him. Sinclair had been in America, and he might have chanced to have
heard something of some one who had had a doubtful baby found dead on
the bed just before its mother sailed. If this had been a sensation
novel, Mr. Si