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discovered, in bags, upon the floor. I wish you, therefore, to discard
from your thoughts the blundering idea of motive, engendered in the
brains of the police by that portion of the evidence which speaks of
money delivered at the door of the house. Coincidences ten times as
remarkable as this (the delivery of the money, and murder committed
within three days upon the party receiving it), happen to all of us
every hour of our lives, without attracting even momentary notice.
Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that
class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory
of probabilities--that theory to which the most glorious objects of
human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration. In
the present instance, had the gold been gone, the fact of its delivery
three days before would have formed something more than a coincidence.
It would have been corroborative of this idea of motive. But, under the
real circumstances of the case, if we are to suppose gold the motive
of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an
idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his motive together.
"Keeping now steadily in mind the points to which I have drawn your
attention--that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling
absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this--let us
glance at the butchery itself. Here is a woman strangled to death
by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney, head downward. Ordinary
assassins employ no such modes of murder as this. Least of all, do they
thus dispose of the murdered. In the manner of thrusting the corpse
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