Page:Mystery Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.pdf/81

 avoid the incoherence with which it is originally set forth.

"The first aim of the writer is to show, from the brevity of the interval between Marie’s disappearance and the finding of the floating corpse, that this corpse cannot be that of Marie. The reduction of this interval to its smallest possible dimension, becomes thus, at once, an object with the reasoner. In the rash pursuit of this object he rushes into mere assumption at the outset. ‘It is folly to suppose,’ he says, ‘ that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderer. to throw the body into the river before midnight. We demand at once, and very naturally, why? Why is it folly to suppose that the murder was committed within five minutes after the girl’s quitting her mother’s house? Why is it folly to suppose that the murder was committed at any given period of the day? There have been assassinations at all hours. But, had the murder taken place at any moment between nine o’clock in the morning of Sunday and a quarter before midnight, there would still have been time enough ‘to throw the body into the river before midnight.’ This assumption, then, amounts precisely to this—that the murder was not committed on Sunday at all; and, if we allow ‘ L’Etoile’ to assume this, we may permit it any liberties whatever. The paragraph beginning, ‘It is folly to suppose that the murder,’ etc., however it appears as printed in ‘ L’Etoile,’ may be imagined to have existed actually thus in the brain of its inditer— ‘It is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was committed on the body, could have been committed soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight. It is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to purpose at the same time (as we are resolved to suppose), that the body