n the jury, and I wasn't there, so he
didn't sell it. Been tryin' to for a week. He told the old lady that was
his last day here, and he was leavin' then."

"And about what time of night was it when you heard the shot in Isom
Chase's house, and ran over?"

"Along about first rooster-crow," said Sol.

"And that might be about what hour?"

"Well, I've knowed 'em to crow at 'leven this time o' year, and ag'in
I've knowed 'em to put it off as late as two. But I should judge that it
was about twelve when I come over here the first time last night."

Sol was excused with that. He left the witness-chair with ponderous
solemnity. The coroner's stenographer had taken down his testimony, and
was now leaning back in his chair as serenely as if unconscious of his
own marvelous accomplishment of being able to write down a man's words
as fast as he could talk.

Not so to those who beheld the feat for the first time. They watched the
young man, who was a ripe-cheeked chap with pale hair, as if they
expected to catch him in the fraud and pretense of it in the end, and
lay bare the deceit which he practised upon the world.

The coroner was making notes of his own, stroking his black beard
thoughtfully, and in the pause between witnesses the assembled neighbors
had the pleasure of inspecting the parlor of dead Isom Chase which they
had invaded, into which, living, he never had invited them.

Isom's first wife had arranged that room, in the hope of her young
heart, years and years ago. Its walls were papered in bridal gaiety, its
colors still bright, for the full light of day seldom fell into it as
now. There hung a picture of that bride's father, a man with shaved lip
and a forest of beard from ears to Adam's apple, in a little oval frame;
and there, across the room, was another, of her mother, Quakerish in
look, with smooth hair and a white something on her neck and bosom, held
at her throat by a portrait brooch. On the table, just under that
fast-writing young man's eyes, was a glass thing shaped like a cake
cover, protecting some flowers made of human hair, and sprigs of
bachelor's button, faded now, and losing their petals.

There hung the marriage certificate of Isom and his first wife, framed
in tarnished gilt which was flaking from the wood, a blue ribbon through
a slit in one corner of the document, like the pendant of a seal, and
there stood the horsehair-upholstered chairs, so spare of back and thin
of shank that the