Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Widow's Walk: Or the Mystery of Crime Late in the evening of a cold day in the month of January, 1804, a fiddler and a clarionet-player, attached to the orchestra of the celebrated Cafe des Aveugles, turned their steps towards the home afforded them at the public expense, in the national hospital of the Quinze-Vingts. The fiddler was called Michel, and the name of the clarionet-player was Corniquet. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.