So off he goes to the station-master and tells him as there's a murdered body in one of the carriages in the siding; and the station-master's as put out as never was." Mrs.Bateson's eyes and mouth opened wide in amazement and interest.
"What a tale, to be sure!" "And then," added Peter's mother, growing more dramatic as the story proceeded, "the station-master sends for the police, and the police sends for the crowner, so as everything shall be decent and in order; and they walks in a solemn procession--with two porters carrying a shutter--to the carriage where Peter lies, all as grand and nice as if it was a funeral." "I never heard tell of such a thing in my life--never!" "Then the station-master opens the door with one of them state keys which always take such a long time to open a door which you could open with your own hands in a trice--you know 'em by sight." Mrs.Bateson nodded.

Of course she knew them by sight; who does not?
"And then the crowner steps forward to take the handkerchief off the face of the body, it being the perquisite of a crowner so to do," Mrs.
Hankey continued, with the maternal regret of a mother whose son has been within an inch of fame, and missed it; "and just picture to yourself the vexation of them all, when it was no murdered corpse they found, but only our Peter with an attack of the toothache!" "Well, I never! They must have been put about; as you would have been yourself, Mrs.Hankey, if you'd found so little after expecting so much." "In course I should; it wasn't in flesh and blood not to be, and station-master and crowner are but mortal, like the rest of us.

I assure you, when I first heard the story, I pitied them from the bottom of my heart." "And what became of Peter in the midst of it all, Mrs.Hankey ?" "Oh! it woke him up with a vengeance; and, of course, it flustered him a good deal, when he rightly saw how matters stood, to have to make his excuses to all them grand gentlemen for not being a murdered corpse.

But as I says to him afterward, he'd no one but himself to blame; first for being so troublesome as to have the toothache, and then for being so presumptuous as to try and cure it.

And his father is just the same; if you take your eye off him for a minute he is bound to be in some mischief or another." "There's no denying that husbands is troublesome, Mrs.Hankey, and sons is worse; but all the same I stand up for 'em both, and I wish Miss Elisabeth had got one of the one and half a dozen of the other.