At a long table in the centre of the room were seated several young gentlemen, dressed with singular independence of style.  From one point of view they looked like actors, bearing about them signs of fatigue, as if from heavy night work.  Observed again, they resembled young lawyers of indolent habits and scanty practice, who had just dropped in to watch the case.

From their conversation, no clue to their professional identity could be gathered.  They were cracking jokes, propounding conundrums, and telling stories humorously broad to each other.  Everything was to them a legitimate amusement.  The proceedings of the day before were peculiarly rich in funny reminiscences; and one tall, bright, curly-haired fellow was evoking roars of suppressed laughter by his capital mimicry of two of the dullest witnesses.  Another was drawing comic profiles of a sleepy juryman on a scrap of paper.  He had previously dashed off a very happy sketch of the coroner, and shown it to that functionary, who had “haw-hawed,” and pronounced it “devilish good,” and, in turn, presented the young artist with a fine Havana cigar, which he playfully put in his mouth and chewed the end of.  Yet there were, about these young gentlemen, signs of business, which an intelligent observer might have easily interpreted.  From the outside breast pockets of each of them protruded a number of pencils; and, from their lower side pockets, thick memorandum books with gray covers, or stiffly folded quires of foolscap.

They were the reporters of the press—­the gamins and good fellows of literature;—­fellows of inexhaustible resources, who carry their wits literally at their fingers’ ends;—­who can do more than extract sunbeams from cucumbers; for they can make up thrilling facts out of nothing;—­who can thread their way through a crowd where a tapeworm would be squeezed to death;—­whose writing desk is usually another man’s back; and who sketch out a much better speech between an orator’s shoulder blades than he is making in front;—­whose written language is a perplexity compared with which Greek is a relaxation and Sanscrit a positive amusement;—­who deal in adjectives, and know their precise value, and how to administer them, as an apothecary knows the drugs that are boxed and bottled on his shelves;—­who are less men than parts of an enormous mill grinding out grist to be branned and bolted in the editorial rooms, made into food in the printing office and press vault, and served up hot for the public’s breakfast next morning.

Clever, witty, insatiable fellows they, for whom a planet ought to be set apart, where all the murders are wrapped in impenetrable mystery, and the smallest railroad accidents are frightful catastrophes.

The east side of the room, where the dead body had been found, was preserved inviolate from the broom, mop, and other touch, until the inquest was over.  The strange machine stood in its accustomed place, flanked by the screen.  It had been extensively handled and looked at, and passed for a new kind of clock.  Two large weights (which had fallen to the floor) and the interplaying cogwheels gave force to that conjecture.