on the table; the dead man's manuscript was gone!

[1] The reader will here observe a discrepancy between Mrs. Poyntz's
account and Sir Philip Derval's narrative. According to the former, Louis
Grayle was tried in his absence from England, and sentenced to three
years' imprisonment, which his flight enabled him to evade. According to
the latter, Louis Grayle stood his trial, and obtained an acquittal. Sir
Philip's account must, at least, be nearer the truth than the lady's,
because Louis Grayle could not, according to English law, have been tried
on a capital charge without being present in court. Mrs. Poyntz tells her
story as a woman generally does tell a story,--sure to make a mistake when
she touches on a question of law; and--unconsciously perhaps to
herself--the woman of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to
save the personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated her interest,
not from the moral odium of a great crime, but the debasing position of a
prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt, purposely omits to notice
the discrepancy between these two statements, or to animadvert on the
mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It
is consistent with some of the objects for which Allen Fenwick makes
public his Strange Story, to invite the reader to draw his own inferences
from the contradictions by which, even in the most commonplace matters
(and how much more in any tale of wonder!), a fact stated by one person is
made to differ from the same fact stated by another. The rapidity with
which a truth becomes transformed into fable, when it is once sent on its
travels from lip to lip, is illustrated by an amusement at this moment in
fashion. The amusement is this: In a party of eight or ten persons, let
one whisper to another an account of some supposed transaction, or a piece
of invented gossip relating to absent persons, dead or alive; let the
person, who thus first hears the story, proceed to whisper it, as exactly
as he can remember what he has just heard, to the next; the next does the