“I found a large company assembled in the castle court, waiting for the coroner from Portsmouth, though the sentry on guard would allow no one to go down, in spite of some, even ladies, I am ashamed to say, who offered him bribes for the permission.  Everything, I heard, had been replaced as we found it.  The poor Major himself was there, looking sadly broken, and much needing the help of his son’s arm.  ’To think that I was blaming my poor son as a mere reprobate, and praying for his conversion,’ says he, ’when he was lying here, cut off without a moment for repentance.’  There was your nephew, suspecting nothing, Squire Brocas, Mr. Eyre, of Botley Grange, Mr. Biden, Mr. Larcom, and Mr. Bargus, and a good many more, besides Dr. James Yonge, the naval doctor, and the Mayor of Portsmouth, and more than I can tell you.  When the coroner came, and the jury had been sworn in, they went down and viewed the spot, and all that was there.  The soldiers had put candles round, and a huge place it is, all built up with large stones.  Then, as it was raining hard, they adjourned to the great room in the keep and took the evidence.  Robert Oakshott identified the clothes and the watch clearly enough, and said he had no doubt that the other remains were Peregrine’s; but as to swearing to a brother’s bones, no one could do that; and Dr. Yonge said in my ear that if the deceased were so small a man as folks said, the skeleton could scarce be his, for he thought it had belonged to a large-framed person.  That struck no one else, for naturally it is only a chirurgeon who is used to reckon the proportion that the bones bear to the body, and I also asked him whether in seven years the other parts would be so entirely consumed, to which he answered that so much would depend on the nature of the soil that there was no telling.  However, jury and coroner seemed to feel no doubt, and that old seafaring man, Tom Block, declared that poor Master Peregrine had been hand and glove with a lot of wild chaps, and that the vault had been well known to them before the gentlemen had had it blocked up.  Then it was asked who had seen him last, and Robert Oakshott spoke of having parted with him at the bonfire, and never seen him again.  There, I fancy, it would have ended in a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown, but Robert Oakshott must needs say, “I would give a hundred pounds to know who the villain was.”  And then who should get up but George Rackstone, with “Please your Honour, I could tell summat.”  The coroner bade swear him, and he deposed to having seen Master Peregrine going down towards the castle somewhere about four o’clock that morning after the bonfire when he was getting up to go to his mowing.  But that was not all.  You remember, Anne, that his father’s cottage stands on the road towards Portsmouth.  Well, he brought up the story of your running in there, frightened, the day before the bonfire, when I was praying with his sick mother, calling on me to stop a fray between Peregrine and young Sedley, and I had to get up and tell of Sedley’s rudeness to you, child.”