arried it a step further than I have done.

"Well, sir," said he, "the money had not been paid more than a month,
when an insurance office down at Liverpool communicated with us. The
same game had been played with them; but, somehow, their suspicions were
excited. We compared notes with them, and set detectives to work.
They traced Martin's confederates, and found one of them was in prison
awaiting his trial for some minor offense. They worked on him to tell
the truth (I am afraid they compounded), and he let out the whole truth.
Every one of those villains could swim like ducks, and Richard Martin
like a fish. Drowned? not he: he had floated down to Greenwich or
somewhere--the blackguard! and hid himself. And what do you think the
miscreants did next? Bought a dead marine; and took him down in a box to
some low public-house by the water-side. They had a supper, and dressed
their marine in Richard Martin's clothes, and shaved its whiskers, and
broke its tooth, and set it up in a chair, with a table before it, and
a pot of ale, and fastened a pipe in its mouth; and they kept toasting
this ghastly corpse as the thing that was to make all their fortunes."
At this grotesque and horrible picture, a sigh of horror was uttered in
the veranda. Mr. Carden, occupied with his narrative, did not hear it,
but Coventry did. "Then, when it was pitch dark, they staggered down to
the water with it, and planted it in the weeds. And, mark the cunning!
when they had gone through their farce of recognizing it publicly for
Richard Martin, they bribed a churchwarden and buried it under our very
noses: it was all done in a way to take in the very devil. There's no
Richard Martin; there never was a Richard Martin; there never will be:
all this was contrived and executed by a swindler well known to the
police, only they can't catch him; he is here, and there and everywhere;
they call him 'Shifty Dick.' He and his myrmidons have bled the
'Gosshawk' to the tune of nine hundred pounds."

He drew his breath and proceeded more calmly. "However, a lesson of this
kind is never thrown away upon a public man, and it has given me some
very curious ideas about another matter. You know what I mean."

Coventry stared, and looked quite taken aback by this sudden turn.

However he stammered out, "I suppose you mean--but, really, I can't
imagine what similarity--" he paused, and, inadvertently, his eye glanced
uneasily toward the veranda.

"Oh," said Mr. Ca