themselves, as their head-quarters; and at this point in my
investigations I despatched to the papers the advertisement you have
seen.'

'But,' I exclaimed, 'even now I utterly fail to see by what mysterious
processes of thought you arrived at the wording of the advertisement;
even now it conveys no meaning to my mind.'

'That,' he replied,' will grow clear when we come to a right
understanding of the baleful _motive_ which inspired these men. I have
already said that I was not long in discovering it. There was only one
possible method of doing so--and that was, by all means, by any means,
to find out some condition or other common to every one of the victims
before death. It is true that I was unable to do this in some few
cases, but where I failed, I was convinced that my failure was due to
the insufficiency of the evidence at my disposal, rather than to the
actual absence of the condition. Now, let us take almost any two cases
you will, and seek for this common condition: let us take, for example,
the first two that attracted the attention of the world--the poor woman
of the slums of Berlin, and the celebrated man of science. Separated by
as wide an interval as they are, we shall yet find, if we look closely,
in each case the same pathetic tokens of the still uneliminated
_striae_ of our poor humanity. The woman is not an old woman, for she
has a "small young" family, which, had she lived, might have been
increased: notwithstanding which, she has suffered from hemiplegia,
"partial paralysis." The professor, too, has had not one, but two,
large families, and an "army of grand-children": but note well the
startling, the hideous fact, that _every one of his children is dead!_
The crude grave has gaped before the cock to suck in _every one_ of
those shrunk forms, so indigent of vital impulse, so pauper of civism,