Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd Corner

by Charles Heber Clark

So of course when Thomas Cooley went up, he wasn't sorry; and the more Cooley was scattered over New Castle county, the more serene and affable the coroner felt. When he had selected his jury and looked around him a little in order to command the situation, he perceived that Cooley had put into his hands a tolerably good thing. The coroner spent the next three days holding an inquest upon each of the twelve fragments of the deceased. He empaneled a new jury every time, and then proceeded cautiously and deliberately in each case.

There was by no means complete unanimity of opinion. The first jury decided that "the deceased met his death by being struck by something sudden." The second one advanced the theory that "Thomas Cooley was surreptitiously and insidiously blowed apart." The others threw out suggestions respecting the probability that the trouble came from Cooley's well-known weakness for flying machines, or from his being lifted out and cut up by some kind of a hurricane. Once the jury decided not to bring in a verdict, but merely to pass resolutions of regret.

And the coroner would sit there over the particular piece of Cooley in question, and smile and permit these manifestations of generous feeling to have full play. It didn't perplex him that all the verdicts differed. "Truth," he remarked to a friend, "is well enough. But as Cooley is certainly dead, what's the odds if we can't agree as to what killed him? Let us collect our fees and yield with Christian resignation to destiny."

It was always interesting to me to hear that coroner converse upon the subject of resignation. He would rather have died than to have resigned while any of the Cooleys were in town inventing explosive compounds.

The Cecil county coroner discovered six pieces of the deceased within his jurisdiction, but his pride would not permit him to yield the supremacy in such a matter to his rival over the line. The New Castle man had twelve inquests, and so would he, with more besides. And his juries used to go out and consult and come in after a while with a majority report, declaring, perhaps, that deceased was killed by fooling with some sort of a gun, and a minority report insisting that he had been murdered and dissected by a medical student or students unknown.

And then the coroner would disband the inquest and drum up a fresh jury, which would also disagree, until out of those six fractions of poor old Cooley the coroner got thirty-seven deliberations, with the attendant fees. And every time the doctors would testify that post-mortem examinations revealed the fact that the inside of the deceased was crammed with fragments of the Latin language; and invariably the jurors would sit there and try to look as if they understood those terms, although a dim impression prevailed most of the time that the physicians were indulging recklessly in profanity.

And when a relative of Cooley's testified before the thirty-seventh jury that "Thomas Cooley was a man of marked idiosyncrasies, and his brain was always excited by his irresistible fondness for chimeras of various kinds," the jury looked solemn and immediately brought in a verdict that "death was caused by idiosyncrasies forming on his brain in consequence of excessive indulgence in chimeras, thus supplying an awful warning to the young to refrain from the use of that and other intoxicating beverages."

Only two pieces fell in Kent county, but the coroner was animated by even greater professional enthusiasm than his neighbors across the border. He spent the entire season over as much of Cooley as he could reach. All his juries but one disagreed, and he had eighty-four. The sixth would have been unanimous but for an obstinate man named Selfridge. All the others were for a verdict of mysterious butchery, but Selfridge insisted upon attributing the disaster to nitro-glycerine. So earnest was he that he fought over the subject with a fellow-juryman named Smith; and he held Smith down and remonstrated with him, and showed him the matter in different lights, and bit his nose to convince Smith that the nitro-glycerine hypothesis was correct. And when the jury was dismissed, Selfridge, true to his solemn convictions, carried the war into the papers, and published an obituary poem entitled "A Monody on the Death of Thomas Cooley," in which he presented his views in this fashion: