calling to me. I looked up, and saw that Betteredge's
patience had failed him at last. He
was just visible between the sand hills, returning
to the beach.

The old man's appearance recalled me, the
moment I perceived it, to my sense of present
things, and reminded me that the inquiry which
I had pursued thus far still remained incomplete.
I had discovered the smear on the
nightgown. To whom did the nightgown
belong?

My first impulse was to consult the letter in
my pocket—the letter which I had found in the
case.

As I raised my hand to take it out, I
remembered that there was a shorter way to
discovery than this. The nightgown itself would
reveal the truth; for, in all probability, the
nightgown was marked with its owner's name.

I took it up from the sand, and looked for
the mark.

I found the mark, and read—-

MY OWN NAME.

There were the familiar letters which told
me that the nightgown was mine. I looked up
from them. There was the sun; there were
the glittering waters of the bay; there was old
Betteredge, advancing nearer and nearer to me.
I looked back again at the letters. My own
name. Plainly confronting me —- my own
name.

"If time, pains and money can do it, I will
lay my hand on the thief who took the Moonstone."
I had left London, with those words
on my lips. I had penetrated the secret which
the quicksand, had kept from every other living
creature. And, on the unanswerable evidence
of the paint-stain, I had discovered Myself as
the Thief.

NOTHING LIKE EXAMPLE.

THERE is to be found in many of what we call
the low parts of London, and in the back
regions of higher neighbourhoods as well, a
shop, established for the sale of cheap
periodicals and newspapers, bottles of ink, pencils,
bill-files, account books, skeins of twine, little
boxes of hard water colours, cards with very
sharp steel pens and a holder sown to them,
Pickwick cigars, peg-tops, and ginger-beer.
Cheap literature is the staple commodity; and it
is a question whether any printed sheet costing
more than a penny ever passes through the
hands of the owner of one of these temples of
literature.

One of the leading features in these secondrate
newsvenders' windows—- perhaps the
leading feature, and certainly the object to
which it is the special desire of the present
writer to draw attention —- is always a great
broadsheet of huge coarsely executed woodcuts,
representing, in a style of art the badness
of which has never been surpassed at any period
of our uncivilisation, every kind of violent and
murderous act, every foul and diabolical crime,
every incident marked by special characteristics
of noisomeness, horror, or cruelty, which the
annals of the week preceding the publication
day of this grievous sheet have furnished for
the benefit of the morbidly disposed part of the
British public. Only the worst crimes are
commemorated here. Has some wretched
child been tormented with rare ingenuity by an
unnatural parent; has some miserable woman
been assaulted with more than common ferocity
by her husband; has a father been murdered by
his son, or a son by his father; has an ardent
lover blown out his sweetheart's brains, or his
own, or both his sweetheart's and his own;
here, as surely as the Saturday comes round,
we have thrust before our eyes, certain great
woodcut illustrations of such horrors, the
original ghastliness of the subjects being
supplemented by the additional grimuess which the
vilest and rudest execution can impart. In a
word, if, in the course of the week you have
happened to glance at some newspaper paragraph,
describing a state of things so shocking
that you have instinctively left it unread—an
account of some miserable creature left for
years in an underground cellar to perish through
neglect and starvation— the details of some
unnatural piece of cruelty from which you have
turned away as a thing by occupying yourself
with which you could do no possible good to
yourself or any one else—be sure that as
certainly as the end of the week comes round, you
will find all the details of the horror which you
have shrunk from examining, exhibited before
you in the window of the cheap newsvender.

While the smaller criminal incidents of the
week are thus illustrated, the greater events,
the crimes célèbres, are not forgotten. These are
always commemorated on a larger scale than the
less remarkable acts of atrocity. The greater
the crime, the larger the woodcut. This seems
to be the simple rule of the artist who furnishes
these illustrations. It is not uncommon, in the
cases of very distinguished criminals indeed, to
follow out the story of his crime from beginning
to end; showing him first in the act of commiting
the murder, then in the condemned cell
taking leave of his friends, then on his way to
the scaffold or in the pinioning-room, and lastly
actually on the scaffold with the noose
suspended over his head.

I have before me, at this moment, two of
these sheets—- rival competitors for public
favour—- on each of which are represented scenes
of the kind just described. They exhibit the
final passages in the life of Miles Wetherill, the
Todmorden murderer. On one of these broadsheets,
is an immense woodcut, with figures
eight or nine inches high, illustrating the
leavetaking between the culprit and his sweetheart;
on the other, is an engraving of the same size
giving the public the benefit of the actual scene
which took place on the scaffold on the occasion
of the execution of this wretched creature and
of another more obscure criminal named Faherty.
An odious picture this, in which the principal
personage is shown standing with bared neck,