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except this vault. How extraordinary, that after working an hour
at the wall, he should forget for awhile such dreadful suspicions,
and leave investigation for merriment ! He has, then, notwith-
standing his complaint of the tools he worked with, broken through
two courses of brick. Two courses of brick!-how much thicker
are walls usually made ? Should he not have known that a few
more strokes of his hammer and the vault was entered ? He proves
the fact so to be-for upon his next exertion be demolishes'the wall
in a few minutes.
The morning after the ball-after his hour's labor-he is in bed
until nine o'clock. In the afternoon he returns to the wall. Officer
Kingsley interrupts him as he is recommencing, and requests to be
let into Dr. Webster's room. Littlefield forgets the window, and
his surreptitious entrance a day or two before, and replies, You
cannot, the doors are locked. At the same time he sees Officer
Trenholme ; tells him what he is doing; he does not ask him to rrr-
company him as a witness to his labors, as one would naturally
suppose him, under the circumstances, to ask ; but says to the offi-
cer, Go away, and come back in twenty minutes. The officer re-
turns at the end of the time, but Littlefield has already broken
through the walls, detected the remains, remarked in the tearful
agitation of his frame (as described by his wife) that they
were under the Professor's privy-hole, and hurried away to Dr.
Bigelow's in a state of increased agitation, but nevertheless collected
enough to lock the cellar-door after him, for when Officer Trenholme
desires to go down, the wife lets him in with a duplicate key. By-
and-bye he returns, the City Marshal and other officers are there ;
while in the vault, steps are heard in the laboratory above ; Little-
field exclaims, Webster is there now! Was he there ? Had he not
seen the Professor leave the premises ? He was not there. It was
his Taife and children, as he subsequently discovered.
What a moment to give the coup de grace to a conspiracy ! The
husband has been alone down stairs, and alone (though witnesses
were at hand) had discovered one portion of remains ; the wife up
stairs, where other portions were in a few moments developed with
a knife most carefully placed, and directly by a cut in the flesh.
Littlefield bustles around the laboratory, and with marvellous
celerity, hatchets, knives, towels from the vault marked " W,"
bunches of keys, bones in the furnace, trowsers and slippers
stained, are produced, and exhibited with the remains in the pres-
ence of a gaping little crowd to the prisoner. What wonder that
he became temporarily delirious at the exhibition of all these ac-
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