I looked with some interest at the twelve "good men and true." They were a representative group of British tradesmen, quiet, attentive, and rather solemn; but my attention was particularly attracted by a small man with a very large head and a shock of upstanding hair whom I had diagnosed, after a glance at his intelligent but truculent countenance and the shiny knees of his trousers, as the village cobbler.

He sat between the broad-shouldered foreman, who looked like a blacksmith, and a dogged, red-faced man whose general aspect of prosperous greasiness suggested the calling of a butcher.
"The inquiry, gentlemen," the coroner commenced, "upon which we are now entering concerns itself with two questions.

The first is that of identity: Who was this person whose body we have just viewed?
The second is, How, when, and by what means did he come by his death?
We will take the identity first and begin with the circumstances under which the body was discovered." Here the cobbler stood up and raised an excessively dirty hand.
"I rise, Mr.Chairman," said he, "to a point of order." The other jurymen looked at him curiously and some of them, I regret to say, grinned.

"You have referred, sir," he continued, "to the body which we have just viewed.

I wish to point out that we have not viewed a body: we have viewed a collection of bones." "We will refer to them as the remains, if you prefer it," said the coroner.
"I do prefer it," was the reply, and the objector sat down.
"Very well," rejoined the coroner, and he proceeded to call the witnesses, of whom the first was the labourer who had discovered the bones in the watercress-bed.
"Do you happen to know how long it was since the beds had been cleaned out previously ?" the coroner asked, when the witness had told the story of the discovery.
"They was cleaned out by Mr.Tapper's orders just before he gave them up.