Mr. Speke is alive, after all. He was arrested on
Friday at Padstow, near Bodinin, in Cornwall, in the disguise of a drover. The local police were " wanting " a defaulter who had escaped from Hull, and fancied the apparent drover might be the missing man. When disabused of this impression, they were struck by the dis- similarity between the prisoner's dress and conversation, and at length " accused" him of being Mr. Speke, a " charge" which he reluctantly admitted. They seem to have considered that for a. clergyman to conceal his name was an offence, and detained him in custody until he could communicate with his friends. Mr. Murdoch immediately started for Cornwall, and found that his brother-in-law, under a hallucination explained elsewhere, had really intended to conceal himself for ever, had, on the evening of the 8th of January, taken the train for Southampton, and thence had wandered on foot amongst the villages of Cornwall to Padstow, where he was accidentally arrested. He intended as soon as the hue and cry had grown cold to have left England for America. He has returned to London, intends, on medical advice, to make a tour on the Continent, and will return, we trust, a healthy and once more an obscure man. The facts, which we have explained at more length elsewhere, are strange enough, but there seems no ground of any sort for any imputation whatever upon his personal character. He is a little better and a great deal weaker than most other people, and that is all. The only incident of his escapade left entirely unexplained is the discovery of a hat with his name in it in Birdcage Walk.
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