st parallel with the soil. Juve happened to
glance casually at the nearest leaf, and uttered an exclamation of
surprise and gratification.

"Gad, here's something interesting!" and he drew the magistrate's
attention to some little pilules of earth with which the plant was
peppered.

"What is that?" enquired M. de Presles.

"Earth," said Juve, who had swept the top of the leaf with the palm of
his hand; "ordinary earth, like the rest ten inches below, on the
grass."

"Well, what about it?" said the puzzled magistrate.

"Well," said Juve with a smile, "I imagine that ordinary earth, or any
kind of earth, has no power to move of its own volition, much less to
jump up ten inches into the air and settle on the top of a leaf, even a
rhubarb leaf! So I conclude that since this earth did not get here by
itself it was brought here. How? That is very simple! Somebody has
jumped on to the grass there, M. de Presles; he has removed the marks of
his feet by smoothing the earth with his hands; the earth soiled his
hands, and he rubbed one against the other quite mechanically; the earth
which was on his hands fell off in little balls on to the rhubarb leaf,
and remained there for us to discover. And so it is certain--this is one
proof more--that even if the murderer did not get in from outside, he
did at any rate take to flight after he had committed the crime."

"So it can't be Charles Rambert after all," said the magistrate.

"It 'ought to be' Charles Rambert!" was Juve's baffling reply.

The magistrate waxed irritable.

"My dear sir, your everlasting contradictions end by being rather
absurd! You have hardly finished building up one laborious theory before
you start knocking it down again. I fail to understand you."

Juve smiled at M. de Presles' sudden irritability, but quickly became
grave again.

"I am anxious not to be led away by any preconceived opinion. I put the
hypothesis that so and so is guilty, and examine all the arguments in
support of that theory; then I submit that the crime was committed by
somebody else, and proceed in the same way. My method certainly has the
objection that it confronts every argument with a diametrically opposite
one, but we are not concerned with establishing any one case in
preference to another--it is the truth, and nothing else, that we have
to discover."

"And that is tantamount to saying that in spite of the overwhelming
circumstantial evidence, and in spite of the fact that