em by bushels, but there was
not a good one among the lot. The police could not even manufacture a
clue.

Arthur Constant's death was already the theme of every hearth, railway
carriage and public house. The dead idealist had points of contact with
so many spheres. The East End and West End alike were moved and excited,
the Democratic Leagues and the Churches, the Doss-houses and the
Universities. The pity of it! And then the impenetrable mystery of it!

The evidence given in the concluding portion of the investigation was
necessarily less sensational. There were no more witnesses to bring the
scent of blood over the coroner's table; those who had yet to be heard
were merely relatives and friends of the deceased, who spoke of him as
he had been in life. His parents were dead, perhaps luckily for them;
his relatives had seen little of him, and had scarce heard as much about
him as the outside world. No man is a prophet in his own country, and,
even if he migrates, it is advisable for him to leave his family at
home. His friends were a motley crew; friends of the same friend are not
necessarily friends of one another. But their diversity only made the
congruity of the tale they had to tell more striking. It was the tale of
a man who had never made an enemy even by benefiting him, nor lost a
friend even by refusing his favors; the tale of a man whose heart
overflowed with peace and good will to all men all the year round; of a
man to whom Christmas came not once, but three hundred and sixty-five
times a year; it was the tale of a brilliant intellect, who gave up to
mankind what was meant for himself, and worked as a laborer in the
vineyard of humanity, never crying that the grapes were sour; of a man
uniformly cheerful and of good courage, living in that forgetfulness of
self which is the truest antidote to despair. And yet there was not
quite wanting the note of pain to jar the harmony and make it human.
Richard Elton, his chum from boyhood, and vicar of Somerton, in
Midlandshire, handed to the coroner a letter from the deceased about ten
days before his death, containing some passages which the coroner read
aloud: "Do you know anything of Schopenhauer? I mean anything beyond the
current misconceptions? I have been making his acquaintance lately. He
is an agreeable rattle of a pessimist; his essay on 'The Misery of
Mankind' is quite lively reading. At first his assimilation of
Christianity and Pessimism (it occurs in his