Place, Lambeth, a small wooden box, sealed
up in this envelope, and containing a valuable
ot great price. The box, when claimed, to be
only given up by Messrs. Buslie and Co. on
the personal application of Mr. Luker."

Those lines removed all further doubt, on
one point at least. The sailor had been in
possession of the Moonstone, when he had left
the bank on the previous day.

I felt another pull at my coat-tails.
Gooseberry had not done with me yet.

"Robbery!" whispered the boy, pointing, in
high delight, to the empty box.

"You were told to wait down-stairs" I said.
"Go away!"

"And Murder!" added Gooseberry, pointing,
with a keener relish still, to the man on the
bed.

There was something so hideous in the boy's
enjoyment of the horror of the scene, that I
took him by the two shoulders and put him out
of the room.

At the moment when I crossed the threshold
of the door, I heard Sergeant Cuff's voice,
asking where I was. He met me, as I returned
into the room, and forced me to go back with
him to the bedside.

"Mr. Blake!" he said. " Look at the man's
face. It is a face disguised—and here's the
proof of it!"

He traced with his finger a thin line of livid
white, running backward from the dead man's
forehead, between the swarlhy complexion, and
the slightly-disturbed black hair. "Let's see
what is under this," said the Sergeant,
suddenly seizing the black hair, with a firm grip of
his hand.

My nerves were not strong enough to bear
it. I turned away again from the bed.

The first sight that met my eyes, at the other
end of the room, was the irrepressible
Gooseberry, perched on a chair, and looking with
breathless interest, over the heads of his elders,
at the Sergeant's proceedings.

"He's pulling off his wig!" whispered Gooseberry,
compassionating my position, as the only
person in the room who could see nothing.

There was a pause and then a cry of
astonishment among the people round the bed.

"He's pulled off his beard!" cried
Gooseberry.

There was another pause. Sergeant Cuff
asked for something. The landlord went to the
washhand-stand, and returned to the bed with
a basin of water and a towel.

Gooseberry danced with excitement on the
chair. " Come up here, along with me, sir!
He's washing off his complexion now!"

The Sergeant suddenly burst his way through
the people about him, and came, with horror in
his face, straight to the place where I was
standing.

"Come back to the bed, sir!" he began. He
looked at me closer, and checked himself.
"No!" he resumed. "Open the sealed letter
first—the letter I gave you this morning."

I opened the letter.

"Read the name, Mr. Blake, that I have
written inside."

I read the name that he had written. It was
—Godfrey Ablewhite.

"Now," said the Sergeant, " come with me,
and look at the man on the bed."

I went with him, and looked at the man on
the bed.

GODFREY ABLEWHITE!

BEAVERS.

THE colour of the skin is the origin of the
name of this mammal, which varies from buff
to chesnut-brown. Beavers have, though
rarely, been found with black and blueish and
white and spotted furs. The beaver, according
to Buffon, ranges over forty degrees of latitude,
from twenty to sixty, and is black in the cold
north, and straw-coloured in warmer climates.
The fine fur is of an uniform brown, about half
an inch long; but the coarse hairs, about two
inches long, are generally chesnut; and they
determine the colour of the pelt. The glossy-
black beavers occur but rarely in high northern
latitudes, about a dozen a year being seen at a
factory in Hudson's Bay, where a white beaver
may be seen once in twenty years. Mr. Samuel
Hearne saw a pelt of this kind which had
brown and reddish hairs along the ridge of the
back, whilst the belly was silvery white. Prince
Maximilian once saw a beaver beautifully
spotted with white, and he says pure and
yellowish white beavers are not unfrequently
caught on the Yellowstone River.

Beavers, says Buffon, form the link between
the quadrupeds and the fishes, as the bat is the
link between the quadrupeds and the birds.
Beavers are gnawers, rodents, with two large
cutting teeth, which are separated from the
grinders by an empty space. The foreparts of
the beavers adapt them to the land, their
hindparts for the water, their small forepaws with
five long toes serving them as hands, and their
larger webbed hindfeet acting as paddles. As
for the fishy scaly tail, which is often in the
water whilst the body is out of it, opinions differ
respecting its functions, being somewhat by
turns of a rudder, a trowel, and an alarum. A
large beaver may weigh some fifty or sixty
pounds, and it may be about three feet long
from the point of the snout to the tip of the tail;
one foot being the length of the appendage.

A hundred years ago M. Buffon received a
present of young beaver. Buffon (who said the
style is the man) attired himself in full dress,
peruke, and ruffles, before sitting down to write
a sort of prose in full dress, in which he has left
us an account of the beaver he kept. He does not
appear to have done unto his beaver as he would
have been done unto; and therefore the poor
prisoner, though gentle, peaceable, and familiar,
is described as melancholy and plaintive. If
Buffon had known more about beavers, or if he
had considered his pet more carefully, he would
have learned that it was something more than a