But Sandy Sanderson’s burning solicitude to fix the crime flickered out in the face of opposition, and in the end he bowed his head to the inevitable “open verdict.”  Then the floodgates of inkland were opened, and the deluge pattered for nine days on the deaf coffin where the poor idealist mouldered.  The tongues of the Press were loosened, and the leader-writers revelled in recapitulating the circumstances of “The Big Bow Mystery,” though they could contribute nothing but adjectives to the solution.  The papers teemed with letters—­it was a kind of Indian summer of the silly season.  But the editors could not keep them out, nor cared to.  The mystery was the one topic of conversation everywhere—­it was on the carpet and the bare boards alike, in the kitchen and the drawing-room.  It was discussed with science or stupidity, with aspirates or without.  It came up for breakfast with the rolls, and was swept off the supper-table with the last crumbs.

No. 11 Glover Street, Bow, remained for days a shrine of pilgrimage.  The once sleepy little street buzzed from morning till night.  From all parts of the town people came to stare up at the bedroom window and wonder with a foolish face of horror.  The pavement was often blocked for hours together, and itinerant vendors of refreshment made it a new market centre, while vocalists hastened thither to sing the delectable ditty of the deed without having any voice in the matter.  It was a pity the Government did not erect a toll-gate at either end of the street.  But Chancellors of the Exchequer rarely avail themselves of the more obvious expedients for paying off the National Debt.

Finally, familiarity bred contempt, and the wits grew facetious at the expense of the Mystery.  Jokes on the subject appeared even in the comic papers.

To the proverb, “You must not say Bo to a goose,” one added, “or else she will explain you the Mystery.”  The name of the gentleman who asked whether the Bow Mystery was not ’arrowing shall not be divulged.  There was more point in “Dagonet’s” remark that, if he had been one of the unhappy jurymen, he should have been driven to “suicide.”  A professional paradox-monger pointed triumphantly to the somewhat similar situation in “the murder in the Rue Morgue,” and said that Nature had been plagiarising again—­like the monkey she was—­and he recommended Poe’s publishers to apply for an injunction.  More seriously, Poe’s solution was re-suggested by “Constant Reader” as an original idea.  He thought that a small organ-grinder’s monkey might have got down the chimney with its master’s razor, and, after attempting to shave the occupant of the bed, have returned the way it came.  This idea created considerable sensation, but a correspondent with a long train of letters draggling after his name pointed out that a monkey small enough to get down so narrow a flue would not be strong enough to inflict so deep a wound.  This was disputed by a third writer, and the contest raged so keenly about the