A curious inquest took place at Chartham, near Canterbury, on
Monday on the bodies of Hermann Stoer, aged about twenty-eight, and his wife or fiancee,—though no marriage- certificate was found, the lady wore a wedding-ring, and was called his wife by Mr. Stoer in the letter he left behind him, —who were found dead on Saturday, June 10th, in Cookering Wood, where they are supposed to have committed suicide on the day previous. They had lived in lodgings in Canterbury for just four weeks, from May 12th till the day on which they destroyed themselves, the lady generally playing very mournful music, which, however, changed on the -day of their death into triumphant strains, attracting the special attention of their landlady. The lady was only twenty-two, and looked, much younger. Their bodies were found on a grassy spot in the wood,—Mrs. Stoer with her bands crossed over her breast, and her husband with his head close to his wife's neck and a six-chambered revolver in his hand, of which two chambers had been discharged. By a letter to his brother, and one 'addressed to the public, which he left behind him, it appears that Mr. Stoer thought himself a poet and a man of genius, and found
it hard to live, the public not sharing, or not as yet having even awakened to the necessity of judging whether or not it shared, that impression. The lady to whom he was engaged knew of his intention of destroying him- self, and begged to share his fate, for which purpose apparently she came over from Germany, a month before their suicide. It was proved in evidence that Mr. Stoer's father had long been in an asylum, and the jury charitably gave in a verdict of suicide committed in an unsound state of mind, after he had first put an end to his wife by a bullet-wound in the head. The circumstances of the death were evidently so aesthetically arranged as to excite interest and compassion and some feeble curiosity as to the unsuccessful author, whose verse, however, was very weak, and whose prose was feebly sentimental.
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