superlative style only
seen in its perfection on the shirt fronts of aldermen, contractors, and
Washington Market butchers), and the native New York manner of speaking,
which is sharp and mandatory. The coroner began life as a stone mason,
gained early distinction as a fireman, controlled several hundred votes
in his ward, became a member of a political committee, and got a
coronership as his share of the spoils. He had aspired to be a police
justice, or city inspector, or commissioner of the Croton Board. To
either of these positions, or, for that matter, to any position
indefinitely higher, he felt himself perfectly equal. But other members
of the committee (which was a kind of joint-stock company for the
distribution of offices) had prior and stronger claims than Harry
Bullfast, and so he was put off with a coronership. He felt the slight
acutely, but, like a prudent man, determined to so keep himself before
the public in his performance of the office, as to make it a stepping
stone to something much higher--the city comptrollership, or a seat in
the State Senate, or in Congress, or (who could tell?) the governorship
of the commonwealth--that grand possibility which every ward politician
carries in his hat.

The coroner was seated in the inventor's private armchair, with one leg
thrown over the side of it, and the other stretched on the floor. He was
chewing tobacco with manly vigor, and cracking jokes with a facetious
juryman, who was assistant foreman of the Bully Boy Hose, of which the
coroner was an exempt and honorary member.

The jury was composed of six men whom the coroner had picked from the
large number of idle spectators found by him at the scene of the murder
when he was first summoned. Two of them chanced to be acquaintances of
his. As to the rest, the coroner had not the remotest idea. They might
have been beggars or pickpockets, for aught that he cared. They looked
stupid, and he liked stupid jurors.

"Them sharp fellers that thinks they knows more'n the cor'ner, is a
cussed nuisance," he often had occasion to remark.

The jury sat near one of the windows, in a semicircle of chairs which
had been borrowed from the first and second floors. Pending the
resumption of their melancholy work, such of them as could read were
reading newspapers containing reports of the first day's proceedings,
from two to ten columns long, wherein the scene of the "Mysterious
Midnight Tragedy," as one paper called it, was