Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1902-09-27 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

STARTLING SKETCHES.]  By W. W. 111.7TCHINGS. Tragodiee of London Life," etc., etc.  to be seen ; around her neck was a oord, four times knotted.  Carefully. was the skeleton taken up and borne into the house for the great anatomist and his colleagues to examino it. The lime, too, was scrupulously collected to the last morsel, in order that it might be analysed by M. Orfila. Having completed his examination, M. Doumoutier pronounced that the remains were those of a woman about seventy years of age, and about 4ft. Bin. in height; that from the smallness of the hands and the appearance of the nails she had been unaccustomed to hard manual labour; that she had been strangled but not suspended, so that it was a case not of suicide but of murder: that she must have been interred within a few hours of death, since the body had been bent nearly double so that it might be got into its exiguous bed, which must have been done before rigor mortis sot in; and that it had probably been lying there ten or twelve years. That the quicklime had done its work so ineffectually was easily explained by M. Orfila.; the murderec or murderers had forgotten to moisten it, and had thus preserved what they were bent upon destroying.  As the men of science stated their conclusions and gave their reasons for them, the man of law would not repress his satisfaction. When they had finished, as we learn from Spicer's " Judioal Dramas," which supplements the story as told by M. Canler, the magistrate turned to the prisoners. "These gentlemen," he told them, "knew nothing of the charge for which you have been arrested yet in two hours they have drawn a perfect picture of your victim. It only remains for me to mention her name-tho widow Houet 1"  It was on the 26th of April, 1833, that this uncanny scene was enacted in the Rue de Vaugirard. The widow Bonet, seventy years of age, had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from mortal ken on the 13th of September, 1821, twelve years less four months before. If, therefore, this skeleton was indeed hers, the calculation of the men of science as to her age and as to the time she had been lying in her unhallowed grave was marvellously near the mark.  The old lady, who was possessed of a fortune of about £6,000, had lived in the Rue Saint-Jacquee. She had a daughter married to a man named Robert, who had kept a wine bar but had beoome bankrupt, and who liked her as little as she liked him. Ott this 13th of September, 1821 about seven o'clock in the morning, having sent out her servant on an errand, she was visited by a man with whom she went out. She was seen crossing the Rue de la Harpe; then she disappeared as completely as though the ground beneath her feet had opened and swallowed her up. Nor could the most searching enquiries trace out who had led her forth from the home to which she was never to return..  Madame Houet's neighbours, however, were at no loss to account for her disairpeara.nce ; they had no doubt whatever that she had been made away with by her disreputable son-in-law. The bad terms that existed between thew were no secret. He had complained of her speculating in lotteries and had said that she would have nothing to leave him &ad his wife eh her death; while  4114,P SIS 66 SISSS&SSISISVDSSiSeeSS A 11 air 66&sssississssssisssssss lb b h I 11 '4 41