When Marcus and his counsel, accompanied by the faithful lieutenant of police, arrived in a close carriage at the scene of the inquest, at the hour of adjournment next morning, they saw a convincing illustration of the power of paper, types, and ink.

The morning journals, with whole leaded pages of evidence, and new diagrams of the house and fatal room; and the enterprising illustrated weekly, with portraits of the deceased, the prisoner, his counsel, Tiffles, Patching (great hat and all), Patty Minford, the coroner, the foreman of the jury, a full-page design of the murder, as it was supposed to have taken place, representing the infuriate Wilkeson, club in hand, standing over the prostrate body of the inventor, from whose forehead the gore was pouring in torrents—­all these delightful, provocatives of sensation had done their full and perfect work.

At that moment, Marcus Wilkeson was known to the world of readers in New York and the whole country round about, as the murderer of Eliphalet Minford.

On the second morning of the inquest an immense crowd of people were assembled in front of the house.  They had been collecting since five A.M., when a party of six Jerseymen, having sold off their stock of nocturnal cabbages at Washington Market, had taken position of vantage before the house, from which they and their wagons were afterward dislodged with great effort by a squad of police.  Some butcher boys, also returning from their night’s work at market, were next on the ground, and selected adjacent awning posts and trees, as good points of observation.  Mechanics and shop girls, going to their labor, recklessly postponed the duties of the day, and stopped to stare, awestricken, at the house.

A knot of people in a street, is like a drift of wood in a river.  It chokes up the stream, and catches all the other wood that is floating down.

The police had in vain tried to clear out this human throng.  They had waged the following contests with their fellow citizens, since six o’clock A.M.:—­first, they had driven the Jersey market wagons to the street corner below; second, they had tumbled the butcher boys out of the trees, where they hung like a strange species of fruit; third, they had cleared a space of ten feet square in front of the house.  Having done thus much, the police paused from exhaustion, and endured the jokes of the populace with philosophic disdain.

Three policemen guarded the door, within which no one was admitted but the coroner, the jury, witnesses, a few political friends of the coroner, who exhibited passes from him, and about twenty-five reporters, fifteen of whom really belonged to newspapers, and the remainder had a general connection with the press, which could never be clearly defined and established.  To the magic word “reporter,” accompanied by the flourish of a pencil and a roll of paper, the three policemen smiled obsequiously, and unbarred the way.  Seeing how well this plan worked, two gentlemen of inelegant leisure, and at least one pickpocket, provided themselves with rolls of paper and pencils, and, giving the password, were admitted.