ne with the swooning woman. Not a sound, far or near,
broke the stillness of the coming night.

No 5.--Mr. Frederic Darnel, Member of the College of Surgeons, testifies
and says:--

IN the intervals of my professional duty I am accustomed to occupy
myself in studying Botany, assisted by a friend and neighbor, whose
tastes in this respect resemble my own. When I can spare an hour or
two from my patients, we go out together searching for specimens. Our
favorite place is Herne Wood. It is rich in material for the botanist,
and it is only a mile distant from the village in which I live.

Early in July, my friend and I made a discovery in the wood of a very
alarming and unexpected kind. We found a man in the clearing, prostrated
by a dangerous wound, and to all appearance dead.

We carried him to the gamekeeper's cottage on the outskirts of the
woods, and on the side of it nearest to our village. He and his boy were
out, but the light cart in which he makes his rounds, in the remoter
part of his master's property, was in the outhouse. While my friend was
putting the horse to, I examined the stranger's wound. It had been quite
recently inflicted, and I doubted whether it had (as yet, at any rate)
really killed him. I did what I could with the linen and cold water
which the gamekeeper's wife offered to me, and then my friend and I
removed him carefully to my house in the cart. I applied the necessary
restoratives, and I had the pleasure of satisfying myself that the vital
powers had revived. He was perfectly unconscious, of course, but the
action of the heart became distinctly perceptible, and I had hopes.

In a few days more I felt fairly sure of him. Then the usual fever set
in. I was obliged, in justice to his friends, to search his clothes in
presence of a witness. We found his handkerchief, his purse, and his
cigar-case, and nothing more. No letters or visiting cards; nothing
marked on his clothes but initials. There was no help for it but to wait
to identify him until he could speak.

When that time came, he acknowledged to me that he had divested himself
purposely of any clew to his identity, in the fear (if some mischance
happened to him) of the news of it reaching his father and mother
abruptly, by means of the newspapers. He had sent a letter to his
bankers in London, to be forwarded to his parents, if the bankers
neither saw him nor heard from him in a month's time. His first act was
to withdraw this letter. T