I looked with some interest at the twelve "good men and
true." They were a representative group of British tradesmen, quiet,
attentive, and rather solemn; but my attention was particularly
attracted by a small man with a very large head and a shock of
upstanding hair whom I had diagnosed, after a glance at his intelligent
but truculent countenance and the shiny knees of his trousers, as the
village cobbler. He sat between the broad-shouldered foreman, who looked
like a blacksmith, and a dogged, red-faced man whose general aspect of
prosperous greasiness suggested the calling of a butcher.
"The inquiry, gentlemen," the coroner commenced, "upon which we are now
entering concerns itself with two questions. The first is that of
identity: Who was this person whose body we have just viewed? The second
is, How, when, and by what means did he come by his death? We will take
the identity first and begin with the circumstances under which the body
was discovered."
Here the cobbler stood up and raised an excessively dirty hand.
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