reported
him exactly in the same condition. But what did that signify? 'Twas all
one. The man was dead--as dead to all intents and purposes that moment
as he would be that day twelvemonths, or that day hundred years.

Dr. Walsingham, who had just been to see poor Mrs. Sturk--now grown into
the habit of hoping, and sustained by the intense quiet fuss of the sick
room--stopped for a moment at the door of the Phoenix, to answer the
cronies there assembled, who had seen him emerge from the murdered man's
house.

'He is in a profound lethargy,' said the worthy divine. ''Tis a
subsidence--his life, Sir, stealing away like the fluid from the
clepsydra--less and less left every hour--a little time will measure all
out.'

'What the plague's a clepsydra?' asked Cluffe of Toole, as they walked
side by side into the club-room.

'Ho! pooh! one of those fabulous tumours of the epidermis mentioned by
Pliny, you know, exploded ten centuries ago--ha, ha, ha!' and he winked
and laughed derisively, and said, 'Sure you know Doctor Walsingham.'

And the gentlemen began spouting their theories about the murder and
Nutter, in a desultory way; for they all knew the warrant was out
against him.

'My opinion,' said Toole, knocking out the ashes of his pipe upon the
hob; for he held his tongue while smoking, and very little at any other
time; 'and I'll lay a guinea 'twill turn out as I say--the poor fellow's
drowned himself. Few knew Nutter--I doubt if _any_ one knew him as I
did. Why he did not seem to feel anything, and you'd ha' swore nothing
affected him, more than that hob, Sir; and all the time, there wasn't a
more thin-skinned, atrabilious poor dog in all Ireland--but honest,
Sir--thorough steel, Sir. All I say is, if he had a finger in that ugly
pie, you know, as some will insist, I'll stake my head to a china
orange, 'twas a fair front to front fight. By Jupiter, Sir, there wasn't
one drop of cur's blood in poor Nutter. No, poor fellow; neither sneak
nor assassin _there_--'

'They thought he drowned himself from his own garden--poor Nutter,' said
Major O'Neill.

'Well, that he did _not_,' said Toole. 'That unlucky shoe, you know,
tells a tale; but for all that, I'm clear of the opinion that drowned he
is. We tracked the step, Lowe and I, to the bank, near the horse-track,
in Barrack Street, just where the water deepens--there's usually five
feet of water there, and that night there was little short of ten. Now,
take it, that