wife, only separated from him for three years,
and having lived with him eleven, could make a
mistake as to his identity, even though the face
of the dead man was disfigured by decomposition,
seems almost impossible. Her description,
too, of the scar upon his hand— such
description being given before she had seen the
body—is very difficult to reconcile with the
fact that she was mistaken. Yet that she was
so one cannot rationally doubt. The evidence
of the doctor who had attended the man, of
his own brother, and subsequently of his wife
is entirely conclusive, and is corroborated by
that of the labourer who found the unfortunate
lunatic spending a cold afternoon in
February on a sand-heap cutting out a boat.
His answers to this labourer were those of a
madman; a madman had just escaped from a
neighbouring lunatic asylum; the name of that
madman was Heasman, and in his flight, he
had carried off with him some boots belonging
to another inmate of the asylum named
Harnett; the name of Heasman was found on the
dead man's linen, and the name of Harnett
on a boot in the cupboard in which the body
was found.

It is impossible to reject such evidence as
this, and yet if we admit it, we must admit
also that the evidence of the other claimant of
the body, Mrs. Banks, the widow who had
"minutely examined the remains on two
occasions, and had not the least doubt that they
were those of her husband," is worthless. The
difficulty in which the arriving at this conclusion
involves those who accept it is so great
that they soon get suspicious, and some pains
are taken, on the occasion of the coroner's
inquiry, to elicit the fact that the widow
would be a gainer by being able to prove her
husband's death. This, however, turns out
not to be the case. No elucidation is to be
found in that quarter, and we are driven in
search of an explanation to other and wilder
speculations. Might the wish have been father
to the thought—not the wish that the man
might be dead, but the wish that the fate
of the husband who had absented himself for
three years might be certified. She might
desire to marry again. A hundred reasons, in
short, might exist why if he was dead she
might wish to know it. And then as to the scar
on the hand of the corpse, described so
accurately by Mrs. Banks before she had seen the
body, how do we account for that mystery?
Scarcely by coincidence, the tallying of the
description with the fact is too minutely accurate
for that. Yet if we do reject the theory of
coincidence, what are we driven to? To the
conclusion that this Mrs. Banks had either met
with some description of the body in which this
scar was mentioned, or that some one who had
seen the body had told her of it. The presence
of the scar altogether adds to the difficulties of
this difficult case. The doctor of the lunatic
asylum who held throughout to the belief that
the deceased was certainly no other than Heasman,
had never noticed the cut; neither had
his brother, nor even his wife. Yet this, which
seems at first sight like an important defect
in the evidence brought forward by the doctor,
and by the Heasman family, is really of much
less consequence than it looks to be. How
many of us are there who have scores of old
cuts or other injuries contracted in the days
when we first got free access to pocket-knives
and other edged tools, of which our nearest and
most intimate relatives know nothing; or even
when these friends or relatives have, by chance,
knowledge of any such scars or other private
marks which we may have about us, how many
of them could describe the appearances
accurately, or say whether the healed-up wound, or
the inevitable strawberry-mark, was on the right
hand or the left of the friend whom they were
trying to describe?

But instances such as this, of great difficulty
in identifying a dead body, are by no means
uncommon. In the number of the Times which
appeared on the 24th of March, 1866, there is a
curious case recorded of a body found drowned
and much decomposed, which vas claimed by
two young men as that of their father— a Mr.
Etherington, and which they buried under that
name. Some months after his burial, however,
this Mr. Etherington walks into his daughter's
house alive and well. Of course, under these
circumstances, it, becomes necessary to find out,
since the body which had been interred was not
that of Etherington, whose it really was, and
then it comes out that a certain William Turner
—who when last seen had been in a very
wretched condition, covered with boils and
sores, and suffering from ague, and who had
told some one that he could never go back to live
where he had previously been residing—had also
been missing lately, and so it gradually got to
be suspected that the body which had been
found must really have been his. This suspicion
soon became converted into an absolute certainty,
when a portion of the neckerchief which had
been found on the deceased was discovered in
an odd corner of the very last lodging which
William Turner had occupied.

This story is very like one authenticated by
the coroner of Burton-upon-Trent, and
communicated by him but the other day to the
Times. Only in this latter case the body
identified is that of the brother, and not the father
of the persons claiming it; and, moreover, when
this last comes forward, still there in the flesh,
the question as to whose, after all, were the
remains which were found in the Trent is left
unanswered.

Another story something akin to both of these
is quoted from the Annual Register by a
correspondent of the Times on the 15th of April
last. It was a woman this time whose body
was discovered in the water (with marks of
violence on it), and it was her own father who
identified it. It was his daughter's body, he
said, and so said the neighbours also, and
she had been murdered, he was sure, by her
husband, who always used her ill. His evidence
was so convincing that at last this bad husband