and bearing since he had been placed under official surveillance, Margrave
had commissioned the policeman Waby to make inquiries in the village to
which the accuser asserted he had gone in quest of his relations, and Waby
had there found persons who remembered to have heard that the two brothers
named Walls lived less by the gains of the petty shop which they kept than
by the proceeds of some property consigned to them as the nearest of kin
to a lunatic who had once been tried for his life. Margrave had then
examined the advertisements in the daily newspapers. One of them, warning
the public against a dangerous maniac, who had effected his escape from an
asylum in the west of England, caught his attention. To that asylum he
had repaired.

There he learned that the patient advertised was one whose propensity was
homicide, consigned for life to the asylum on account of a murder, for
which he had been tried. The description of this person exactly tallied
with that of the pretended American. The medical superintendent of the
asylum, hearing all particulars from Margrave, expressed a strong
persuasion that the witness was his missing patient, and had himself
committed the crime of which he had accused another. If so, the
superintendent undertook to coax from him the full confession of all the
circumstances. Like many other madmen, and not least those whose
propensity is to crime, the fugitive maniac was exceedingly cunning,
treacherous, secret, and habituated to trick and stratagem,--more subtle
than even the astute in possession of all their faculties, whether to
achieve his purpose or to conceal it, and fabricate appearances against
another. But while, in ordinary conversation, he seemed rational enough
to those who were not accustomed to study him, he had one hallucination
which, when humoured, led him always, not only to betray himself, but to
glory in any crime proposed or committed. He was under the belief that he
had made a bargain with Satan, who, in return for implicit obedience,