herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
swung it between two elms. Here she would lie in the hot summer days,
and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India had sent
her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw her into
day-dreams, which were almost like trances.

These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned for
himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue and cry,
and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away if he could
help it.

The first fact was this. He found among the copies of the city newspaper
they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a square had been cut
out. He procured another copy of this paper of the same date, and found
that the piece cut out was an advertisement to the effect that the A 1
Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to sail from Boston for Calcutta, on
the 20th of June.

The second fact was the following. On the window-sill of her little
hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some
threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood.
They were Myrtle's of course. A simpleton might have constructed a
tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had cast herself from
the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had been thrust out after
a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful
witness,--and so on. Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder.
He said nothing about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger,
and, as soon as he got home, examined them with a magnifier. They had
been cut off smoothly, as with a pair of scissors. This was part of a