Bread & Corpse

At Lake Zoar, near New London, Conn., Sergeant W. E. Bushy of the state police cast bread upon the waters, literally. He was hunting for the body of a Mrs. George Lewis. Recalling a traditional procedure,/- he set five loaves adrift, having to guess where to start them as Mrs. Lewis had drowned unseen, while fishing, her empty boat being the only clue. Four loaves floated idly about. One came to a purposeful halt. Grappling beneath the arrested loaf, Sergeant Bushy brought up Mrs. Lewis's body.

What, if any, laws govern the attraction of a dead body for a loaf of bread, scientists have never determined. One theory: the same currents that carry a body into a backwater or hole under an eddy, will carry a loaf of bread to that spot, on the surface.

/- Sending bread to find drowned bodies occurs in Tom Sawyer and also in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. When Huck, escaped from his father after the latter has kidnapped him from Widow Douglas, runs away to Jackson's Island leaving signs of a foul murder, the townsfolk first fire cannon over the Mississippi River to try to raise his supposed corpse by detonation ; then, hiding on the island, Huck sees them throw loaves of bread into the current. As the loaves float down to him, Huck fishes them in, takes out the plugs, shakes dabs of quicksilver out of the insides and eats them. "It was 'baker's bread'--what the quality eat; none of your low-down corn-pone." Huck is joined by Tom and Joe and together they speculate on how Bill Turner, drowned the summer before, was found by loaded loaves. Tom says its not so much the bread that found the body, or the quicksilver either, but some incantations that were said over them.