carriage, and was living in a sphere very
superior to his. She requested him to attend
at a certain church at a certain honr, having
one arm in a sling, and wearing a black
handkerchief. She described the carriage in
which she would come, and directed him to
go to a certain pew in the church where he
might be opposite to her, and they might have
a view of each other during the service. He
mistook the hour, however, and when he went
to the church he found that the service was
over.

A lady who kept the Grove House Academy,
in Brentford-lane, Ealing, near London, then
wrote to him; he saw her, liked her, and
married her within the week. She proved a
worthy, religious woman, and to the very last
watched and served him with the most faithful
love. When they parted for the last time,
Corder said to her:

"I hope you will not marry again; and, above
all, not marry in a similar way: it is a most
dangerous way of getting a husband."

While in Ealing, Corder lived in seclusion,
seldom going out of his own premises, and
never to church, though his wife took her
pupils there every Sunday. He was, however,
compelled to once or twice visit London, on
matters connected with the school. On these
occasions he always went armed with pistols (in
case of footpads, as he told his wife), and
usually took the long path that used to lead
from the small lane off the Oxford-road at
Turnham-green, by the Woolpack public-house,
through the fields, to Ealing churchyard and
Brentford-lane. He soon began to disagree
with Mrs. Moore, his wife's mother, who lived
with them, and accused her of trying to wean
his wife's affections from him.

On the 19th of April, 1828, an event,
however, happened at Polstead that somewhat
disturbed Corder's matrimonial happiness and his
quiet mode of life at the Ealing school. Two
or three times since Maria's departure with
Corder, her stepmother, the mole-catcher's
wife, had dreamed that the poor girl had been
murdered, and her body hid in the right-hand bay
of the Red Barn. Spiritualists, who are fond of
distorting the simplest dreams into supernatural
revelations, profess to be astonished, even up
to the present time, by the recurrence of this
dream, which was merely the return, at night, of
the ever-recurring suspicions of the day. To
invest such an occurrence with an atmosphere
of the supernatural is a mischievous crab-like
attempt to return to the superstition and
debasement of the middle ages. The suspicion of
the whole family of the Martens had rested on
the Red Barn from the first alarm at Maria's
mysterious silence. The barn had only two
bays. If the body was there, it was as likely
to be in the right as the left bay. It was very
natural that on the third or fourth recurrence
of the dream, the old mole-catcher should
resolve to ask Mrs. Corder's bailiff to allow him to
search the Red Barn, to see if there was
anything in his wife's dream after all.

The Red Barn, so long the nightmare of the
Martens and their shuddering thought by day
and night, was a long, partly tiled wheat-barn,
divided into two bays or divisions for corn,
having between them the usual planked floor for
thrashing, and on to which, at harvest-time, the
loaded waggons could be driven, when the wide
folding-doors on either side were thrown open.
There was a tiled chaff-house on one side of
the barn, and behind it a projecting lean-to.
There was a farm-yard round it, and at the
back of this a long thatched shed to shelter
cattle in wet weather. A gate at the end of
the yard divided the thatched shed in two.
The barn seems to have originally derived its
name merely from its red tiles; tiling being
less frequent than thatch in that part of the
country.

All persons who know the country will
remember such barns as the one we have described.
The yard was heaped with black trampled straw.
It was a lonely place when the flail was not
thumping on the thrashing-floor. When the
cattle were out in the fields, there would be no
sound to break the oppressive silence but the
chirping of a thievish sparrow or two on the tiles,
and the buzz of the large orange-banded bees on
the flowers of the rank nettles that covered last
year's dry dunghills.

There was no flail sounding merrily on that
19th of April, a year all but a month since
Corder and Maria had been seen crossing the
fields towards the Red Barn. Pryke, Mrs.
Corder's bailiff, unlocked the door and went in
first. The bays were covered with litter too
thick for any examination of the floor. The
bailiff therefore pushed the straw back from the
right-hand bay (the scene of the dream) with a
rake and a hayfork. On the floor of the bay
they found some large stones, and the earth
beneath looked loose. Marten then poked the
earth with the handle of his rake and a mole-
pike he had with him, and then removed it. To
their horror, when they tried the iron again,
they turned up something black — evidently part
of a murdered body, and in that ghastly silence
they dared not search further. So they went
to get help, but first locked the door behind
them cautiously, taking the key with them.
Marten remained, wandering about the barn and
searching and moaning for two hours, and then
went home to tell his wife. He then returned
with Pryke and another man, and they dug down
a foot and a half for the body. They at once
knew it to be Maria's, defaced as it was. Round
the neck was a green handkerchief, pulled so
tight that it had made a deep groove in the flesh.
A bullet had passed through the left cheek.
There was a stab in the neck, one in the right
eye, and one through the apex of the heart.
The body was recognised by the half-decayed
clothes, which were stained with blood. The
dreadful dream had come true at last, and it
must have been done by Corder.

On the 22nd of April, about ten o'clock in
the morning, a grave, hard-looking man knocked
at the door of Grove House, Ealing. As the