The bones were laid out on a large table and covered with a sheet, which the sergeant slowly turned back, watching my face intently as he did so to note the impression that the spectacle made upon me.  I imagine that he must have been somewhat disappointed by my impassive demeanour, for the remains suggested to me nothing more than a rather shabby set of “student’s osteology.”  The whole collection had been set out (by the police-surgeon, as the sergeant informed me) in their proper anatomical order; notwithstanding which I counted them over carefully to make sure that none were missing, checking them by the list with which Thorndyke had furnished me.

“I see you have found the left thigh-bone,” I remarked, observing that this did not appear in the list.

“Yes,” said the sergeant; “that turned up yesterday evening in a big pond called Baldwin’s Pond in the Sand-pit plain, near Little Monk Wood.”

“Is that near here?” I asked.

“In the forest up Loughton way,” was the reply.

I made a note of the fact (on which the sergeant looked as if he was sorry he had mentioned it), and then turned my attention to a general consideration of the bones before examining them in detail.  Their appearance would have been improved and examination facilitated by a thorough scrubbing, for they were just as they had been taken from their respective resting-places, and it was difficult to decide whether their reddish-yellow colour was an actual stain or due to a deposit on the surface.  In any case, as it affected them all alike, I thought it an interesting feature and made a note of it.  They bore numerous traces of their sojourn in the various ponds from which they had been recovered, but these gave me little help in determining the length of time during which they had been submerged.  They were, of course, encrusted with mud, and little wisps of pond-weed stuck to them in places; but these facts furnished only the vaguest measure of time.

Some of the traces were, indeed, more informing.  To several of the bones, for instance, there adhered the dried egg-clusters of the common pond-snail, and in one of the hollows of the right shoulder-blade (the “infra-spinous fossa”) was a group of the mud-built tubes of the red river-worm.  These remains gave proof of a considerable period of submersion, and since they could not have been deposited on the bones until all the flesh had disappeared, they furnished evidence that some time—­a month or two, at any rate—­had elapsed since this had happened.  Incidentally, too, their distribution showed the position in which the bones had lain, and though this appeared to be of no importance in the existing circumstances, I made careful notes of the situation of each adherent body, illustrating their position by rough sketches.

The sergeant watched my proceedings with an indulgent smile.

“You’re making a regular inventory, sir,” he remarked, “as if you were going to put ’em up for auction.  I shouldn’t think those snails’ eggs would be much help in identification.  And all that has been done already,” he added as I produced my measuring-tape.