exclamation, the use of superlative adjectives, scarcely met the
case. The murder of Mr. Hamilton Fynes was strange enough. Here
was an unknown man, holding a small position in his own
country,--a man apparently without friends or social position. He
travelled over from America, merely a unit amongst the host of
other passengers; yet his first action, on arriving at Liverpool,
was to make use of privileges which belonged to an altogether
different class of person, and culminated in his arrival at
Euston in a special train with a dagger driven through his heart!
Here was material enough for a least a fortnight of sensations
and countersensations, of rumored arrests and strange theories.
Yet within the space of twenty-four hours the affair of Mr.
Hamilton Fynes had become a small thing, had shrunk almost into
insignificance by the side of the other still more dramatic,
still more wonderful happening. Somewhere between the Savoy Hotel
and Melbourne Square, Kensington, a young American gentleman of
great strength, of undoubted position, the nephew of a Minister,
and himself secretary to the Ambassador of his country in London,
had met with his death in a still more mysterious, still more
amazing fashion. He had left the hotel in an ordinary taxicab,
which had stopped on the way to pick up no other passenger. He
had left the Savoy alone, and he was discovered in Melbourne
Square alone. Yet, somewhere between these two points,
notwithstanding the fact that the aggressor must have entered the
cab either with or without his consent, Mr. Richard Vanderpole,
without a struggle, without any cry sufficiently loud to reach
the driver or attract the attention of any passer-by, had been
strangled to death by a person who had disappeared as though from
the face of the earth. The facts seemed almost unbelievable, and
yet they were facts. The driver of the taxi knew only that three