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LIFE’S LITTLE IRONIES

had not been made. Every day they expected a man or a boy to run up from the meads with the intelligence; but he had never come. Days had accumulated to weeks and months; the wedding had come and gone; Joshua had tolled and read himself in at his new parish, and never a shout of amazement over the millwright’s remains.

But now, in June, when they were mowing the meads, the hatches had to be drawn and the water let ont of its channels for the convenience of the mowers, It was thus that the discovery was made. A man, stooping low with his scythe, caught a view of the culvert lengthwise, and saw something entargled in the recently bared weeds of its bed. A day or two after there was an inquest; but the body was unrecognizable. Fish and flood had been busy with the millwright; he had no watch or marked article which could be identified, and a verdict of the accidental drowning of a person unknown settled the matter.

Aa the body wae found in Narrobourne parish, there it had to be buried. Cornelius wrote to Joshua, begging him to come and read the service, or to send some one; he himself could not doit. Rather than let in a stranger Joshua came, and silently scanned the coroner's order handed him by the undertaker:

“I, Henry Giles, Coroner for the Mid-Division of Outer Wessex, do hereby order the Burial of the Body now shown to the Inquest Jury as the Body of an Adult Male Person Unknown. . .” etc,

Joshua Halborough got through the service in some way, and rejoined his brother Cornelius at his house, Neither accepted an invitation to lunch at their sister’s; they wished to discuss parish matters together. In the afternoon she came down, though they had already catled on her, and had not expected to see her