AS A PROFESSOR

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Professor Collins always had to lecture to large classes at Birmingham, and occasionally the students were not so quiet as they might have been. He never lost his temper, but used to say in a half-serious, half-playful tone of voice, "It is too bad of you to rouse my temper, naturally so sweet." Then laughter followed and quiet.

He always did his best to lighten our work, generally at his own expense. Few of us realised what an enormous amount of work he had to do. I remember going to his private room one day, with a question about my work. I found him writing, papers scattered all around, and as usual, smoking. He did not mind the interruption but drew forward an easy chair asking if I had had a good vacation and was fit for work again. I said that I hoped he also had been taking a rest. "Yes," he said, "I have been lecturing in Germany."

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He did not seem able to take a genuine rest at all, and under stress of work he used to slave for fourteen hours a day, off and on. He was a delightful talker and always put us at our ease, for he seemed to treat everyone as his equal. None of us realised that he was subject to such attacks of depression. To us he was always the same, a genial, sunny, simple and sweettempered man, who has and ever will have a place in the hearts of all those who knew him.

CHAPTER XIII

HIS INTEREST IN CRIMINOLOGY—THE KIRWAN CASE Α LETTER FROM MISS BRADDON -INTERVIEW WITH ROUPELL-AN EVENING WITH THE TICHBORNE CLAIMANT-LAST LETTERS OF THE CLAIMANT-WHITAKER WRIGHT-AN AFTERNOON ROUND THE SCENES OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS-THE MERSTHAM TUNNEL MYSTERYTHE MURDER CLUB-THE EDALJI CASE-HIS

DETECTIVE STORY

E had always been interested in the study of crime and criminals, but it

was not till 1891 that he endeavoured to take any active part in the study. In that year, he happened to pick up at a bookstall an account of the trial of one William Kirwan, whose wife had been found dead on the beach in a secluded spot. Suspicion attached to the husband, who was tried for murder and sentenced to death, the sentence afterwards being commuted to one of penal servitude for life. Notwithstanding that the events took place in 1852 and in Ireland, he felt so convinced, after reading the account of the trial, that there had been a miscarriage of justice, that he did his utmost to trace the man,

MISS BRADDON'S LETTER

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but without success. He merely discovered that the object of his search had been released from prison in 1879, and had then gone to Queenstown, whence he had sailed for America.

In connection with this crime, my father suggested to Miss Braddon that it would form good material for one of her stories. She replied:

ANNESLEY Bank,

LYNDHURST, HANTS, 25th Oct. 1892.

:

DEAR MR COLLINS,-It is too good of you to give me permission to keep the documents as long as I like, but some years ago, I was so unfortunate as to lose the Newspaper Reports of a trial for the murder of Mr O'Donnell, brotherin-law to my husband's sister-rather an interesting murder by the way-and thoroughly Irish in character.

The Newspapers were lent to me by my sisterin-law, who attached considerable value to the record, and tho' I had every desire to preserve them most carefully they mysteriously disappeared, and from that day to this, they have never been found. This experience makes me rather anxious to restore any such record, especially as in this case the documents involve a great deal of thought and labour of your own.

I need hardly say that directly I opened the packet I devoured the contents thereof, and I hope you will not think me either wrong-headed or illogical if I confess that my own impression

in the first instance of hasty reading, was adverse to Mr Kirwan. On going through the affidavits, towards the end of the pamphlet, I see, as you do, a grave doubt as to the unfortunate man's guilt. Taking into consideration that the lady was somewhat eccentric in her indulgence of her passion for bathing, it seems possible that he should have remained in ignorance of her proceedings, even at the close of a September evening, tho' I must say, I think in the first instance, no husband would have allowed his wife to be out of his ken, in such a place and at such an hour.

Still,

That she may have died in some kind of fit seems certainly within the limits of possibility, and on that ground alone, I quite agree with you that the man ought to have been acquitted. I confess I do not like the man, and that I shouldn't be able to write about him with anything like warmth or sincerity of feeling, nor is the story sufficiently complex and mysterious to afford a strong foundation for a novel.

Your own pen, I am convinced-as a logician and profound thinker-would be much more effective in rehabilitating this unhappy man, and I take it that an exhaustive article upon the story would be full of interest for the reader, while a plain and logical statement of the case would be far more powerful and convincing than any embellishment which fiction could embroider on hard facts.

I have to thank you, dear Mr Collins, for a very interesting document, and one not without instruction for a romance writer. I only regret that my sympathies do not, in this case, coincide with yours, for it would have been a great pleasure

WILLIAM ROUPELL

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to me to take up a theme suggested by you.— Believe me, very faithfully yrs.,

Tuesday evening.

MARY MAXWELL.

But it was not often that he took an active part in endeavouring to solve a mystery; he was not so much interested in the crime, as in the psychology of the criminal. An opportunity to see and converse with one who had been the principal figure in a criminal case which had excited his interest, he would not willingly miss. The case of William Roupell the forger had attracted him-chiefly because Roupell had been a man of good position, and had lost his good name and his liberty by confessing to forgeries which would probably never have been discovered.

When, therefore, he heard casually that the exforger was living, he contrived an interview, which he records in his Memoirs :

This evening, Sunday, March 17th, 1895, I met and talked with the famous forger, William Roupell,1 at a house at Brixton Hill. I was sur

1 William Roupell obtained possession of all his natural father's estate by means of a will which he forged. Before committing this crime, he had forged three deeds which he knew would be discovered by his father's executors. To save himself, therefore, and while his father was lying dead in the house, he forged this will (which purported to be a later one than the one already in existence) appointing his mother and himself executors and his