But the body was soon known to be that of a channel pilot.
Ere the end of that week Basset Tresilian had to change his tone, and Diana and her sons took legal steps to make her the mistress and them the masters of Restormel Court. So autumn drew towards winter; but ere the sad widow quitted Carn Spern, one night a carriage drew up, a man alighted, full of bustle and excitement; a well-known voice was heard, and Arthur Tresilian, the elder, was clasped in the arms of his half-fainting wife.
Washed overboard from the steamer, he had been picked up by a vessel bound for Cuba; his coat had been donned by the pilot, so there was an end of all the sorrow and mystery.
It is a ghastly tale I have to tell, in some respects; but so far as regards its close, I have some reason to congratulate myself, and to feel, that "All is well that ends well."
It is almost an old story now, though I was an actor in it; but the world is ever reproducing itself in some form or fashion. Was there not an instance, in the August of 1870, of a resurrection taking place at Harrington, when all that quiet locality was startled from its propriety by the discovery of a body cast in its shroud beside its grave, which had been violated to procure the jewellery with which the deceased had been interred? My adventure, however, refers to the regular old "body-snatching" times, before unclaimed subjects were supplied to the anatomical theatres from our public hospitals, and when houseless ruffians of the lowest and vilest type made a livelihood by their loathsome and almost nameless trade.
I had graduated at the great medical school of Edinburgh, after a hard tussle with Hunter and Fyfe's Anatomies, Bell on the Bones, the cell theories of Schwan, and even grappling with some of the abstruse and now exploded speculations of Gall and Spurzheim. I had mastered all; I had been solemnly "capped" in the old Academia Jacobi VI. Regis Scotorum, by the Reverend Principal L---- (now in his grave); I had undergone all the jollity of the graduation dinner, and with _Frederick Mortimer, M.D._, duly figuring on my portmanteau, found myself, with my college chum, Bob Asher (who, by the way, had _not_ passed), sailing from the harbour of Leith for London, in the Royal Adelaide, one of the only two steamers which then plied between these ports.