ad shaken their heads
when the case was brought in. Impossible, they said. Throat, windpipe,
jugular, all but actually severed, and the loss of blood frightful. As
it was such a foregone conclusion, Doctor Bicknell had employed methods
and done things which made them, even in their professional capacities,
shudder. And lo! the man had recovered.

So, on this morning that Semper Idem was to leave the hospital, hale
and hearty, Doctor Bicknell's geniality was in nowise disturbed by the
steward's report, and he proceeded cheerfully to bring order out of the
chaos of a child's body which had been ground and crunched beneath the
wheels of an electric car.

As many will remember, the case of Semper Idem aroused a vast deal
of unseemly yet highly natural curiosity. He had been found in a slum
lodging, with throat cut as aforementioned, and blood dripping down upon
the inmates of the room below and disturbing their festivities. He had
evidently done the deed standing, with head bowed forward that he might
gaze his last upon a photograph which stood on the table propped against
a candlestick. It was this attitude which had made it possible for
Doctor Bicknell to save him. So terrific had been the sweep of the razor
that had he had his head thrown back, as he should have done to have
accomplished the act properly, with his neck stretched and the elastic
vascular walls distended, he would have of a certainty well-nigh
decapitated himself.

At the hospital, during all the time he travelled the repugnant road
back to life, not a word had left his lips. Nor could anything be
learned of him by the sleuths detailed by the chief of police. Nobody
knew him, nor had ever seen or heard of him before. He was strictly,
uniquely, of the present. His clothes and surroundings were those of the
lowest labourer, his hands the hands of a gentleman. But not a shred
of writing was discovered, nothing, save in one particular, which would
serve to indicate his past or his position in life.

And that one particular was the photograph. If it were at all a
likeness, the woman who gazed frankly out upon the onlooker from the
card-mount must have been a striking creature indeed. It was an amateur
production, for the detectives were baffled in that no professional
photographer's signature or studio was appended. Across a corner of the
mount, in delicate feminine tracery, was written: "Semper idem; semper
fidelis." And she looked it. As many recollect, i