ways, was only a failure because of his physical shortcomings.

He knew his Paris well. In his younger days he had often been there. Indeed, he once resided at St. Cloud with an invalid gentleman for close upon two years. Long years of travel had rendered him a thorough-going cosmopolitan, even though his lot was now cast in a sleepy country village.

The reason of his present visit to Paris was in order to interview the father of one of his adopted daughters, but the man had not kept the appointment, and by waiting from day to day in hope of finding him, he had exhausted his slender finances, and he knew that his patient wife was in a similar condition of penury at home.

He was certainly a strikingly ugly man. His forehead was broad and bulgy, and his face narrowed to the point of the beard. His head seemed too large, his arms too long and ungainly, while his face was deeply furrowed by long years at sea. His mouth, too, was wide and ugly and when he laughed he displayed an uneven row of teeth much discoloured by tobacco.

With folded arms, he was standing by the dead stranger, silently contemplating the white upturned face which showed distinctly in the fading twilight.

“I wonder who he was?” he exclaimed aloud. “Why did he refuse his name, and why was he so particular to burn those papers? He was a queer stick—poor fellow! I suppose they have inquests in France, and I’ll get something as a witness.”

And he pulled the sheet tenderly across to hide the lifeless visage.

“But,” he added, “perhaps I’ve rendered myself liable because I didn’t call in a French doctor!”

Then, suddenly arousing himself, he walked softly across to the stove and, spreading his handkerchief on the floor, raked out all the tinder into it. To his satisfaction he saw, as he had anticipated, that some of the papers, closely folded as they were, had only been burned at the edges.

One of them he opened, and found it covered with typewriting.

“These will, no doubt, prove interesting,” he remarked to himself as he gathered every particle up into the handkerchief, and very carefully folded it over to protect it.

The lid of an old cardboard box which he found under the bed he broke up, and placing one piece above the handkerchief and the other below, he put the whole into the breast-pocket of his 

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