should influence the popular judgment in regard to the other unknown?  This judgment awaited direction, and the known outrage seemed so opportunely to afford it!  Marie, too, was found in the river; and upon this very river was this known outrage committed.  The connexion of the two events had about it so much of the palpable, that the true wonder would have been a failure of the populace to appreciate and to seize it.  But, in fact, the one atrocity, known to be so committed, is, if any thing, evidence that the other, committed at a time nearly coincident, was not so committed.  It would have been a miracle indeed, if, while a gang of ruffians were perpetrating, at a given locality, a most unheard-of wrong, there should have been another similar gang, in a similar locality, in the same city, under the same circumstances, with the same means and appliances, engaged in a wrong of precisely the same aspect, at precisely the same period of time!  Yet in what, if not in this marvellous train of coincidence, does the accidentally suggested opinion of the populace call upon us to believe?

“Before proceeding farther, let us consider the supposed scene of the assassination, in the thicket at the Barrière du Roule.  This thicket, although dense, was in the close vicinity of a public road.  Within were three or four large stones, forming a kind of seat with a back and footstool.  On the upper stone was discovered a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf.  A parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief, were also here found.  The handkerchief bore the name, ‘Marie Rogêt.’  Fragments of dress were seen on the branches around.  The earth was trampled, the bushes were broken, and there was every evidence of a violent struggle.

“Notwithstanding the acclamation with which the discovery of this thicket was received by the press, and the unanimity with which it was supposed to indicate the precise scene of the outrage, it must be admitted that there was some very good reason for doubt.  That it was the scene, I may or I may not believe — but there was excellent reason for doubt.  Had the true scene been, as Le Commerciel suggested, in the neighborhood of the Rue Pavée St. Andrée, the perpetrators of the crime, supposing them still resident in Paris, would naturally have been stricken with terror at the public attention thus acutely directed into the proper channel; and, in certain classes of minds, there would have arisen, at once, a sense of the necessity of some exertion to redivert this attention.  And thus, the thicket of the Barrière du Roule having been already suspected, the idea of placing the articles where they were found, might have been naturally entertained.  There is no real evidence, although Le Soleil so supposes, that the articles discovered had been more than a very few days in the thicket; while there is much circumstantial proof that they could not have remained there, without attracting attention, during the twenty days elapsing between the fatal Sunday and the afternoon