een dead about ten hours, the wound
was unquestionably homicidal, and was inflicted in the manner that he
has described. Death was apparently instantaneous, and I should say that
the deceased never awakened from her sleep."

"But," objected the coroner, "the deceased held a lock of hair in her
hand."

"That hair," replied Thorndyke, "was not the hair of the murderer. It
was placed in the hand of the corpse for an obvious purpose; and the
fact that the murderer had brought it with him shows that the crime was
premeditated, and that it was committed by someone who had had access to
the house and was acquainted with its inmates."

As Thorndyke made this statement, coroner, jurymen, and spectators alike
gazed at him in open-mouthed amazement. There was an interval of intense
silence, broken by a wild, hysteric laugh from Mrs. Goldstein, and then
the coroner asked:

"How did you know that the hair in the hand of the corpse was not that
of the murderer?"

"The inference was very obvious. At the first glance the peculiar and
conspicuous colour of the hair struck me as suspicious. But there were
three facts, each of which was in itself sufficient to prove that the
hair was probably not that of the murderer.

"In the first place there was the condition of the hand. When a person,
at the moment of death, grasps any object firmly, there is set up a
condition known as cadaveric spasm. The muscular contraction passes
immediately into _rigor mortis_, or death-stiffening, and the object
remains grasped by the dead hand until the rigidity passes off. In this
case the hand was perfectly rigid, but it did not grasp the hair at all.
The little tress lay in the palm quite loosely and the hand was only
partially closed. Obviously the hair had been placed in it after death.
The other two facts had reference to the condition of the hair itself.
Now, when a lock of hair is torn from the head, it is evident that all
the roots will be found at the same end of the lock. But in the present
instance this was not the case; the lock of hair which lay in the dead
woman's hand had roots at both ends, and so could not have been torn
from the head of the murderer. But the third fact that I observed was
still more conclusive. The hairs of which that little tress was composed
had not been pulled out at all. They had fallen out spontaneously. They
were, in fact, shed hairs--probably combings. Let me explain the
difference. When a hair is shed natural