Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Pioneer regional crime stories, with a lot of Edinburgh working class dialect. This edition from the American reprint in the "Old Cap Collier" Library. Thirteen short crime stories. 1: The Chinese Chessmen 2: The Broken Cairngorm 3: Billy's Bite 4: The Captain's Chronometer 5: The Changed Diamond Brooch 6: Betty's Bracelet 7: The White Waistcoat 8: The Berwick Burr 9: The Torn Tartan Shawl 10: A White Savage 11: A Dream of Murder 12: The Wrong Umbrella 13: The Family Bible

THE EDINBURGH DETECTIVE

or

His Last Confessions

James M'Govan

(William Crawford Honeyman, 1845–1919)

Old Cap Collier Library, 5 Oct 1883

Contents

1: The Chinese Chessmen

2: The Broken Cairngorm

3: Billy's Bite

4:  The Captain's Chronometer

5: The Changed Diamond Brooch

6: Betty's Bracelet

7: The White Waistcoat

8: The Berwick Burr

9: The Torn Tartan Shawl

10:  A White Savage

11: A Dream of Murder

12: The Wrong Umbrella

13: The Family Bible

___________________

1: The Chinese Chessmen.

THE PLACE where the murder took place is a manufacturing town more than twenty miles from Edinburgh, which I may name Grangely, and in this town the man murdered, Josiah Fletcher by name, had enjoyed the reputation of being the best-hated and worst-tempered man in the community. He was a bachelor, and so I suppose had never got the corners rubbed off him; but apart from that, he appears to have been grasping and stingy in the extreme, especially when the sufferer happened to be poor and not able to retaliate.

I was called out to investigate the affair because there were several very peculiar circumstances which the local police could not unravel. These can be readily summed up. Fletcher was an old man, and had at one time been a hedger and ditcher, but by a life of rigid economy had saved enough to purchase a rickety tenement atone end of the town, which was just falling to pieces. A small factory happened to be built near the building, and Fletcher let this ruin of his in single rooms to the workers as dwelling-houses. As a landlord he was known to exact the uttermost farthing, and never to part with a penny till forced. He was hated by his tenants, and continually quarreling with them and others, so I guessed that the task of ferreting out the person among all these who had taken upon him the crime of ending Fletcher's existence would be no easy one. There was surprise, excitement, and busy speculation on the event in the town, but, so far as I could find, no pity or regret.

Fletcher had lived alone in a two-roomed cottage at the outskirts of the town, and occupied himself chiefly in tilling a large garden, the produce of which he sold. A woman came once or twice a week to clean the house or help him ill the garden, but she did not sleep in the place, and was always gone by eight or nine o'clock at night.

It was this woman, Sib Chapman by name, who discovered the murder, at least twenty-four hours after it had been committed. It was her day for coming to work for Fletcher, and she was there by six o'clock in the morning. She found the door shut, but after knocking for some time, and getting no answer, she tried the latch and found the door unlocked. Thinking that Fletcher had gone out to the garden at the back, she fearlessly entered, intending to begin her work; but she got no further than the kitchen, which was also Fletcher's sleeping place. She saw the form of the old man stretched on the earthen floor in an awkward heap, face downwards, with a crimson pool beneath his face, and big splatches of the same color at different parts of the floor, as if the unfortunate man had staggered or walked about after receiving his death wound. Some of these splatches had dried, thus indicating that the crime had been some time done. Horrified almost into fainting, the woman bent over the prostrate figure, and at once guessed, from the waxen pallor of the features, that life was extinct, and wisely refrained from raising the body, or moving it in any way. Indeed, there was a gap in the throat partially visible from the side, which gave her a wholesome aversion to any closer inspection.

''The auld meeser's deid— murdered very likely for his siller, or maybe jist cut his ain throat in ane o' his mad fits," was her first reflection. "I hope naebody will think it's me that has dune it?"

Away she ran to the nearest house with the  startling news, and in a very short time she had no lack of company or assistance in the house of the deceased. These were all promptly turned out as soon as the police appeared, accompanied by a medical man. Fletcher's form was raised, and pronounced to have been lifeless for twenty-four hours.

The cause of death was a long and deep wound in the throat. There were no decided traces of a struggle having taken place, but two very striking facts were speedily discovered. The first was that no knife or other lethal weapon could be discovered near the body, or in the house, stained with blood, or in any way indicating that it had been used in the commission of the crime; and the second was a crimson foot-print on the cam'staned floor, near the spot where the body had been found, which showed clearly the marks of about a dozen round tackets or hob nails in the sole, and nearly the whole outline of an iron heel.

The body of Fletcher had no boots, but slippers on the feet; and the boots he usually wore, which were found by the fire, were so caked with earth about the sole and heel, that it would have been impossible to get a print of the hob-nails or heel without first having them cleaned. Besides, in size and shape, the footprints of blood on the floor did not match the foot of the deceased, even if the nails had not been caked over with his garden delving.

The foot which had made the imprint appeared to have stepped inadvertently into the crimson pool and thence on to the unstained portion beyond. It had stepped in the direction of the back room, and the window of that room, which looked into the garden, was found open. To follow the footprint, was now the object of the investigators.

No trace of it was to be found in the back room, but there were confused and rough footmarks on the earth outside of the window. A bunch of pansies had been trodden on and crushed, and further across the grounds there were indications of a pause having been made and the earth disturbed. A little scraping up of the soil with a hoe which happened to be lying near soon laid bare a long clasp knife, open, stained with blood, and ground to a keen and razor-like sharpness of edge and point. This knife was readily identified by Sib Chapman as having belonged to Fletcher, but she said nothing at the time of an incident which had impressed the fact upon her memory. There was now no doubt in the minds of the police that a murder had been committed, but how it happened that Fletcher had been slain with his own weapon they were unable even to guess. What the object had been was not so mysterious. By the direction of Sib Chapman an inspection of an old meal crock hidden at the bottom of a wooden chest by the fire was made, and a bundle of banknotes, which Sib declared she had seen there a few days before, had vanished. The only other thing missing was a valuable set of ivory chessmen, which I found had quite a history of its own.

The police of Grangely traced no one, arrested no one, and finally sent for me to help them out of the difficulty; and the first thing which staggered me in the case was this missing set of chessmen. It seemed strange and incomprehensible to me how such a man as Fletcher should have had such a set as they were described to be, for he knew no more about the royal game than the man in the moon. He did not even play draughts, and though said to be cracked on many points, he was in regard to money, or valuables likely to produce money, one of the wisest of the wise. When first Sib alluded to these Chinese chessmen in my hearing she said—

"Oh, it was them that Fletcher and his freend Bailie Broon was aye quarreling aboot. A cuisin o' Fletcher's dee'd in Edinburgh and he got the chessmen, but Bailie Broon, who's a relation, said that he should have got them, and so they were aye feucht, feuchtin' aboot them."

"Do you mean that they actually came to blows about the chessmen?" I asked, wondering why Bailie Brown had not been looked after sooner.

"No, but they were aye cauglin' and quarreling, and at last Fletcher tellt me no to let the Bailie in if he cam' near the hoose when I was there. He said the Bailie wanted to buy the chessmen, but they couldna agree aboot the price; and ae day I saw him busy sherpin' his knife on a razor-hone, and he tellt me it was to cut Bailie Broon's throat if he bothered him ony mair."

I questioned the woman closely upon this point in case she might have inverted the facts; but no— she described Fletcher sharpening the knife and grinding it to a point, and all the while malignantly gloating over the fact that it was for Bailie Brown's throat that the keen edge was being prepared.

That being the case, how did it come that the knife had been used with such terrible power against his own?

Bailie Brown, I found, was a man of position and worth, very much beloved, and of a gentle, kindly disposition, and it did seem improbable that such a man should have suddenly changed into a ferocious murderer and robber. The general opinion of those who had heard the circumstances detailed was that the Bailie had right and justice on his side in his claim to the chessmen, but being a man averse to going to law he had submitted to his grasping relation. Now I did not think it likely that anyone so circumstanced would have taken a man's life and then carried off the very thing likely to direct suspicion to himself, even had he been goaded to the act in a moment of frenzy; but I thought that there could be no harm in seeing the Bailie and getting a little information from him on the subject.

Another point was that though the meal crock had been emptied of money nothing in the box had been disturbed or unduly tossed about in laying the treasure bare, thus clearly indicating that the robber had some knowledge of the hiding place and of Fletcher's habits.

I found the Bailie's house to be quite a contrast to that of the deceased. It was a large, fine building at the other end of the town, and not far from a factory which owned Mr Brown as the chief proprietor, I went to the house, though it was midday, and asked for the Bailie.

I was invited to enter, but shortly the servant reappeared with the statement that the gentleman I sought was at the factory, but would be sent for. While I waited a curious idea came into my head, and I rang a bell at my elbow, and asked the servant to oblige me with a look at a pair of the Bailie's boots. Quite a change came over the girl's face at the request. I had given no name, and she appeared to think me not nearly such a great man when I asked for the boots.

"Oh, you are the shoemaker?" she said, and forthwith she brought me a pair of boots of the kind known as half Wellingtons.

They were very light and neat, and much smaller than I had hoped for, and there was not a trace of a nail or iron heel about them. From the style of the boot I took the Bailie to be a neat little man, and not the burly, rough customer whom I had pictured as the murderer.

"Ah, you've brought me his best boots," I remarked, anxious for information; "it's the coarse ones I wanted— the heavy ones, with tackets in the soles."

"Tackets?" cried the girl, in evident amazement. "I never saw them, and I clean all the boots he has."

"What! never saw the nails in his boots?"

"Never; he wouldn't put on a boot if it had so much as a sprig in it," she said, with great firmness. "I'm sure of that, for I once had to take a pair back on that account."

"Then you may take these away," I remarked with a smile, "for I am not the shoemaker, after all."

She seemed to believe me, and also that I was an escaped lunatic, for she snatched at the boots and vanished with great alacrity. I could hear her and her mistress in the lobby, spying me through the keyhole, and speculating in whispers as to whether I was likely to be dangerous or outrageous.

Presently the Bailie arrived and walked into the room— a slight, little man, as I had pictured him. I gave him my name at once, and that seemed to upset him a little. I cannot say that it was a look of guilt which instantly flashed across his face, but it certainly was one of excitement and uneasiness. He seemed to tremble and fear me— what had he to dread if he was innocent?

"I suppose you have come to talk about Fletcher's death?" he remarked, at length, when he had bustled about the room a little and so recovered countenance to some extent. Isn't it very singular that that set of chessmen which he and. I often wrangled over should have been taken away?"

"It is singular, and I wish you to give me some description of those chessmen, for they will be much more easily traced than money."

"I heard of the money being taken, too," he hurriedly continued;  but, in spite of that, I have an opinion quite opposed to that of the police here. I don't suppose you would care to hear it?"

I quietly negatived the supposition, studying his face closely the while, and not making much of the attempt,

"Well, my opinion is that Fletcher committed suicide," rejoined the Bailie, with great firmness.

"And afterwards ran away with his own money and the set of chessmen— eh?" I answered, with an incredulous smile. "Ho, no; that won't do. The medical man declares that he could not live five minutes with a wound like that in his throat; so how can you account for the knife being buried in the garden?"

"Was it actually?" he said, with a scared look; for we had kept many of the details quiet.

"It was, I assure you, and we have pretty good evidence that the deceased did not put it there."

"I believe that! I believe that!" cried the Bailie, fervently. " It is impossible that he could have put it there," he added with extraordinary decision. " I know that— at least, I think that," he stammered more nervously.

I sat watching the man, and analyzing and weighing his words, but utterly failing to sum them up. He seemed to be innocent, yet to know something of the crime; to be eager to have the mystery cleared up, and frankly communicative, yet to be keeping something back which might assist me materially. I questioned him regarding the chessmen, and learned that they were a valuable set, elaborately carved, as only the Chinese can carve ivory, and worth at least £1 a piece.

"I've had my eye on them for years," he added, "and it was always understood that I was to get them when my friend died; but Fletcher was first on the ground after the death, and he stuck to them out of- sheer spitefulness. He had no use for them, and was miserly enough to be eager for the money they would bring, yet he would not gratify me by selling them, either to me or to any one else who might have resold them to me. Death alone could relax his grasp. A singular fact is that I meant to have gone over and reasoned with him on the subject; indeed, I resolved to do so only a night or two before his death; but— but," and here he wavered a little and seemed confused; "but I never had the chance."

"You mean that you had not time or opportunity to go over?" I said, simply. He crimsoned to the ears, and hurriedly answered—

"No. I mean that I never saw him again in life. Oh, he was mad, undoubtedly. It is not good for man to be alone. I still hold most positively that he had committed suicide."

"Do you not think it more than likely that some needy tramp had taken his life, and afterwards robbed the house?"

"No; for how could a tramp know that a set of chessmen were worth carrying off? There are circumstances which I cannot account for, but I am sure it was a suicide."

Of course; it was to his interest to get us to believe that when he was under suspicion himself. He was right about the chessmen, though; the same thought had occurred to me very early in my investigations; and I now began to wonder if the Bailie could have employed someone to steal the chessmen, and if that robber, being resisted, had unexpectedly found himself a murderer. I left the Bailie and made some inquiry for any disreputable character about the place likely to be so employed, but I was told that the number of such characters was legion, and made little progress in that direction.

I had to return to Edinburgh unsuccessful, and a day or two later received a note from Bailie Brown, enclosing a cutting-from the advertising columns of one of the Edinburgh papers. The advertisement ran something like this—

"To Curio Collectors. —Rare set of Chinese chessmen for sale."

The address given was that of a well-known Edinburgh dealer in such articles; and the note of the Bailie was to the effect that if I thought it worth while I might; being fn the city, go and see the chessmen, and ascertain if they were honestly come by, and whether they resembled the set stolen from Fletcher's house, some peculiarities 'of which he described. My surprise and bewilderment at the curious discoveries which followed may be faintly imagined. I went to the address of the dealer, whom I had spoken with frequently before, and, after some idle talk, asked to see the Chinese chessmen which he had advertised.

"I knew there was something coming, Mr. M'Govan," he laughingly responded. "I look upon you as a kind of stormy petrel— when I see you walk into my shop, I know there's mischief not far behind. But for once you're off the scent. There's nothing wrong with that set of chessmen, for I bought them from a Bailie, no less."

He brought out a curious casket as he spoke, which I examined with the most intense interest. It answered the description given by Bailie Brown in the most minute particulars, and on opening it and looking over some of the pieces I found other points confirmed.

"Well, what was the name of the precious Bailie who sold you these?" I asked at length.

"Bailie Brown," was the prompt reply. "He belongs to Grangely."

"Impossible!" I got out the word in a shout, for the answer was the very last I should have expected. I must have looked strangely horrified, for the dealer looked alarmed at once and said—

"There is something wrong then, after all?" and yet he gave me all the particulars; told me he was a relative of Leighton Brown, who, I had heard, had just such a set of men, and got them at his death, which happened not long ago."

"What was the man like— little, slight figure, dark hair, gentlemanly manner?"

"No, not the least like it. He was a very common man for a Bailie; big, strong fellow, with sandy-colored hair, sun-browned face, and heavy, tacketed boots."

"Tacketed boots? you're sure of that?" I cried, with great eagerness.

"Quite, for they made noise enough. He was clownish in everything but the price he screwed out of me for the chessmen. He knew their value, I tell you."

"Would you know him again?"

"Ay, in the dark. I wondered why he kept his right hand so much in his trousers' pocket, but when he did take it out I saw the reason— he had by some accident lost the middle finger. A blind man could tell him by that."

I took possession of the chessmen, and while doing so chanced to notice that some of the carving on the outside of the casket had got filled with earth, thus silently indicating that it had been buried in the ground, and then but imperfectly cleaned.

The earliest train took me to Grangely, where my first visit was to Bailie Brown. I had now no idea that he was guilty, and told him all I had discovered, and showed him the chessmen, which he identified almost at a glance. Yet it was apparent to me that the news agitated him powerfully; even before I had described the man who had so boldly taken his name and title. When I did describe the man, and came to the right hand wanting the middle finger, his pallor and concern increased.

"It looks like there was a plot against me," he feebly remarked; "but my conscience is clear whatever may happen. I think I know who has done it— it's Willie Melvin."

"Willie Melvin? Who and what is he?"

"Anything or nothing; an idle scamp, who's been in jail nearly as often as there are hairs in his head. He's a great poacher, and I wonder I did not think of him before, as it was said that Fletcher used to help him to get rid of the game. It was sent into the city hidden among Fletcher's cabbages and curlies."

I had no time to lose. I got the Bailie to describe the position of Willie Melvin's home, and started for it alone, though he advised me strongly to take a man with me. The house was quite outside the town, a wretched hovel, with a garden in front, and a pig grunting in its stye noisily. A man stood by the stye, smoking lazily, with his right hand in his trousers' pocket— from force of habit, I suppose. I had no doubt of his identity though I had never clapped eyes on him before, and went up to him boldly, saying—

''Hullo! Willie Melvin, I want you"

I suppose he must have seen me, though I had not seen him, for he instantly changed countenance. He was but a big lump of cowardice after all, for he submitted to be handcuffed without a word.

"What is it for?" he at last sullenly inquired, while a slipshod woman whom I took to be his wife came out and stared at us without any great surprise.

"The murder of Josiah Fletcher," I quietly answered.

He laughed loudly and carelessly.

"Ye can tak' your oath I didna dae that," he said, with a look of relief, "though maybe I ken wha did."

"I suppose you did not do the robbery either?" I returned as cheerfully. "The chessman, I suppose, went and buried themselves, and then dug themselves up, walked into Edinburgh, and sold themselves to a dealer on purpose to get you into trouble?"

His jaw fell, and with a painfully crestfallen look he relapsed into a silence which lasted till I had him in the station-house, before the Fiscal of the town. He had no very intelligent explanation to offer, and was locked up, while I took some men out to his home with spades, and turned up a part of his garden till we came on a bundle of bank notes enclosed in a tin soapbox, and pretty well sodden with the burial. At first Melvin had no explanation to offer regarding the treasure in his garden, but seemed to conclude that the Chinese chessmen were rather strong for him, for he asked to be heard by the Fiscal a second time, and then made an extraordinary statement and accusation.

He had been passing along near Fletcher's cottage at a late hour, when he was surprised to see Bailie Brown leave the cottage in great haste, and so excitedly that he omitted to close the door after him. After waiting for some time Melvin passed through the hedge, crossed the road, and entered the house. All was dark, and in crossing the kitchen floor he stumbled and fell over something on the floor.

Striking a light, he found that the "something" was Fletcher's body lying in a pool of blood. Close by lay an open clasp knife.

"Bailie Broon has murdered him and left the knife there, so that it might look like a suicide," was Melvin's exclamation; and he immediately began to consider how he himself might profit by the discovery. He thought of extorting blackmail from the Bailie, the price of his silence, but finally concluded to let that scheme stand over for a little till he saw how things worked, and meantime to take what loose money the crock happened to contain. He then remembered about the chessmen, and decided to take them too, so that the guilt might be the better fastened on the doer of the deed. Bailie Brown. Then, that it might not be mistaken for a suicide, he lifted the knife and plunged it point first into the garden behind, stamping it down with his feet and scraping some loose earth over the spot. The chessmen he first buried in a field at the back of Bailie Brown's house; then, hearing nothing about them, he lifted them and buried them in his own garden, and finally took them into Edinburgh and sold them in the manner already described.

This queer story was utterly ridiculed, but it chanced that one of the gentlemen present during Melvin's emission of the declaration, remembered distinctly meeting Bailie Brown on the night in question coming hurriedly from the direction of Fletcher's cottage. Other circumstances cropping up, there was no alternative but to arrest the Bailie. It was now that gentleman's turn to make a strange statement. Confronted with the declaration of Melvin, he admitted that he had been in the cottage of Fletcher at the hour stated, and had left in the manner described. He had gone to argue some point about the chessmen, and, receiving no answer to his knock, had lifted the latch and entered. All was dark, and so ominously still that he took a match from his pocket and struck a light. Fletcher was lying on his face quite dead, as described by Melvin, and with a clasp-knife lying open near his hand. He was greatly horrified, and so struck with the fact that he was there under suspicious circumstances that he decided to say nothing of the matter to any one, which resolve he acted upon till forced to declare the truth for his own protection.

This statement, I fear, was credited quite as little as that of Willie Melvin's had been before it; but two singular facts turned up a few days later to modify the scepticism. At the sale of Fletcher's effects a Bible was discovered, having pins stuck into certain leaves, along with a bit of the deadly nightshade, a toad's foot, and some other auxiliaries of witchcraft. In the same book was found a written paper in which Fletcher declared that he was being tormented by Bailie Brown, by means of evil spirits who haunted him night and day, and were always striving to get a hold of his knife that they might cut his throat. They might yet succeed, the paper went on to declare, but if they did his blood would be on the Bailie's head, and the murder lie at his door. He was nevertheless hopeful that some charms which he was working with the Bible would invert the whole, and make his enemy's plotting fall back upon his own head.

The second confirmation came from a relative the deceased, who had come from a distance to wind up his affairs, and who produced several letters of Fletcher's, couched in the same insane terms, and full of ravings of the same description. The conversation and manner of Fletcher for sometime before his death was also recalled in evidence, and at length Bailie Brown was set at liberty. Willie Melvin was put out of mischief's way by being about the same time sent to prison for five years, for his share in the work. As for the chessmen, they are now in the Bailie's possession, and he tells their story a great deal more proudly and better than I have done here.

_______________

2: The Broken Cairngorm.

I HAD to take Jess Murray for her share in a very bold robbery, in which a commercial traveler, peaceably walking home to his hotel, had been waylaid and stripped of pocket-book, purse, and watch, the haul altogether amounting to upwards of £100 in value, the greater part of which was not his own. The gentleman could give no description of the men, but remembered that he had been assisted at a critical moment by a woman, who, so far as he could judge, was tall and handsome, and not very old. It was the style of the robbery as much as that brief and imperfect description which directed my attention to Jess Murray. She was a bold wench, strong as a lion, and so thoroughly bad that I took the trouble of hating her—an exceptional case indeed, as in general one gets to look upon her kind with as much indifference as a drover does upon a herd of horned knowte, under his care one day and gone the next.

I believed Jess to be one of the few who have not one redeeming quality or trait, and was eager for the chance which should put her out of harm's way for a long term of years.

I had really no evidence but an instinctive feeling connecting Jess with the robbery; but when on my way to her place I chanced to pass one of her acquaintances on the street. I let him pass, and then a thought struck me, and I  turned back and stopped him. A scared look came into his face, so I asked him to come with me— back to the Office.

He came reluctantly, and the cause I speedily understood when he tried to throw away behind his back a £20 bank-note taken from the pocket-book of the commercial traveler. The number and description of this note was already in my possession, and I picked up the paper money with the most lively satisfaction, when the fellow immediately began to protest that he had only been sent to change the note, and was willing to tell all about the robbery if things were made right for himself.

The result of this chance capture was that we had abundant evidence against Jess and another, and I went for her with the greatest
of pleasure. She was in the "kitchen" of the place among a crowd of her kind when I entered, and it needed only a motion of my finger and a nod of my head to chase the merriment from her face and bring her slowly across the floor to my side. It is not usual for me to be communicative, but on the present occasion I was elated, and said, in reply to her sullen inquiry—

"It's that affair of the commercial traveler. It's all blown, and you are in for five years at least. Jim White is in the office already, and the £20 bank-note with him."

Jess seemed struck in a heap with the news. She flashed deadly pale and sank feebly into a chair, with her bold bright eyes becoming shiny with tears.

"Where's Dickie?" she faintly articulated to some of the silent onlookers, and, fearing treachery, I snatched out a double brass whistle which can be heard a whole street off, and swiftly raised it to my lips.

"Stop! you needn't," Jess quickly interposed, understanding the motion. '' Dickie's only my laddie. Oh, what will become of him when I'm away?"

Dickie was said to be playing down on the street, so I told him we might see him as we left. Jess began to cry bitterly— Jess! whom I had believed to have not one genuine tear in her! and thus we descended the stairs together. In the street a ragged and unkempt boy of seven or eight was brought to her side, and she clutched him to her breast, kissing his smudged face with a passionate fervor which gave me quite a fresh insight into her character. The boy resembled her in features, and would have passed for good-looking had he only been washed and dressed up a little.

"What's to 'come o' my bairn?— oh, what's to 'come o' my bairn?" wailed Jess, and the boy began to howl in concert, and I saw that it would be useless to try to separate them just then.

"Oh, he'll be looked after as he has often been before," I carelessly answered. "He'll go to the Poor-house. He'll be safer there than under your care— and cleaner."

This remark did not appear to console Jess in the least. Dickie was her only child, and the whole strength of her nature seemed concentrated in her love of that boy. I was astonished, and speculated on the matter all the way to the Office, quietly wondering what "line of business" that same gutter child was destined to torment me and others by adopting, when he should be a few years older.

I had made a pretty shrewd guess of Jess's sentence, for the list of previous convictions was so strong against her that she was awarded exactly the number of years I had named. I was convinced by that time that she did not grieve over the punishment at all, but over her separation from her child, and I remember thinking— "Well, we are poor judges of one another. What a strong hold could be taken of that woman through that child if one only knew how to use the power."

Dickie was allowed to see his mother once before she was sent to the Penitentiary, and then he went back to the Poorhouse. He was a good deal cleaner by that time, and had on different clothing, but there was one plaything, or fetish, with which he had resolutely refused to part, and that still hung from his neck. It was a broken cairngorm stone, with a hole drilled through the end, and through which a bit of twine had been drawn, that he might suspend the trinket from his neck. I had noticed the stone when I took him to the office, with his mother, but merely glanced at it, thinking that it was but an imitation moulded in yellow glass. I was mistaken, for it was part of a real stone, and had probably been set in some stolen brooch which had been broken up for the metal.

It was of no great value, but it pleased Dickie, and kept him from wearying during his long confinement in the Poorhouse, which to him was as irksome as being shut up in a prison. He was a lively, spirited boy, and had never been checked or curbed, so it may be imagined he managed to get into as many scrapes as the average boy of his age.

However, in spite of his mischief and wild pranks, Dickie had a soft spot in his heart, and could be tamed by a gentle word or appeal when lashing had been tried in vain. When he had been about eighteen months in the Poorhouse, a poor knife-grinder was admitted for a day or two, who told Dickie such grand romances of his free life on the road that the boy took an insatiable longing for freedom. Squinting Jerry was the man's name, but though he had an evil look, it was but skin deep, for he was really an honest fellow, and neither a beggar, a thief, nor a tramp in the ordinary sense of these words.

Jerry had been driven to the Poorhouse for a night's shelter, and while there had been laid up for a day or two with a bad leg which troubled him at times, but as soon as he was able to move he hastened to quit the oppressive confinement. Before he had done so, Dickie, by a series of pathetic appeals, had extracted from him a consent to receiving him as an apprentice.

Jerry was really not reluctant to having an assistant whom he needed sorely at times, but he was afraid that the arrangement might get him into trouble with the Parochial authorities, should they be followed and Dickie taken back. Then there were Dickie's antecedents to be considered— he was the son of a convict, and might have the "bad blood" in him, as Jerry expressed to the old knife-grinder therefore agreed to the proposal with reluctance, as we often do with what turns out a great blessing. Dickie had no difficulty in fulfilling his part of the  agreement, for he had already run away twice,  and each time gone hack of his own accord.

He therefore got out of the Poorhouse easily, and joined Jerry a mile or two out of the city. He took with him his only treasure, the broken cairngorm, which someone had declared to him was a diamond, and worth a great deal of money. This opinion was not shared by Jerry, who failed to find a purchaser for the stone, and finally relegated it to a little box in the grinding machine, which they trundled before them wherever they went. Perhaps the parochial authorities were glad to get rid of Dickie, for he was not followed or taken back. The new life suited him— it was free and untrammeled; it had constant variety, and there was a certain spice of romance about it, which made sleeping in the open air, or getting drenched with rain, or lost and benighted, as they often were, mere trifles to he forgotten with the first blaze of sunshine. Compared with his life in  the Poorhouse, Dickie found it heavenly, and very soon a new and altogether unexpected result began to arise from his changed condition.

When Dickie had taken to the road it was sheer impatience of restraint that sent him thither, and he had many ideas of right and wrong which are tolerated only among my "bairns." Now old Jerry, the grinder, was an ignorant man, who did not know one letter from another, but there was one lesson he had learned— that a life of crime is the worst paying trade in the world. Halting by roadside hamlets, resting under shady hedges, or wandering along green lanes, Jerry laid down his ideas to Dickie in a homely fashion, which would have thrown a teacher of grammar into hysterics, but which nevertheless carried conviction to the heart of the boy. Hot that Dickie had ever meant to wrong Jerry, but he bad only taken to this life as a make-shift till his mother should be released from prison.

When questioned as to his intentions for the future, and especially after rejoining his mother, he coolly said that he supposed that he should take to her trade. It was this callous idea that Jerry set himself to undermine, and admirably the old man succeeded, thus affixing a brighter gem to his brow for all eternity than if he had gone as a missionary to the heathen and converted a whole troop of savages. Dickie first listened in respectful patience to the new doctrines of honesty and hard work, then began to imbibe them and manfully adopt them himself, and finally became as firm and resolute in their dissemination as Jerry himself. Out of this sprang a strange act. Dickie had once written to his mother describing his new life, and promising to rejoin her on her liberation; he now wrote a final letter, asserting his intention of separating himself forever from her and her influence, and declaring his intention of growing up "on the square." Jess was nearly insane over the news— not that she cared whether he grew up honest or a thief— but that he should think of separating his life entirely from her own. Three months elapsed before she was able to reply to his letter, and by that time Dickie was hundreds of miles away, leaving no address, and the letter was returned to the Penitentiary marked "Not Found." Jerry was an Irishman, and though he always earned less money in his own country than in Scotland or England, he inclined more to wander at that side of the Channel where, if the people could give nothing else, they were always ready with a kindly greeting or a sympathetic answer, and, of course, Dickie accompanied him. and gradually acquired such a strong smack of the Irish brogue that he would have passed for one of themselves.

When the queer partnership had first been formed Dickie did little but go round the houses at which they paused and ask for knives or scissors to grind, but gradually, as he grew stronger and mastered the intricacies of the grinding as taught by old Jerry, the position of the partners became inverted, Dickie taking the heavy part of the work and Jerry the light. A strong affection had sprung up between them, and Dickie never thought he could do too much for the feeble old man, whose bad leg at times held them in a poor locality till they were literally starved out of it.

During these detentions Dickie, not at all dismayed, sturdily faced the road alone, sometimes making a round of thirty miles in a day, and faithfully returning with the grinding machine and his earnings at night. In this way he had "eaten the district bare," as he said, while Jerry's leg showed no signs of mending or allowing him to move.

"You'll have to take another county, Dickie, darlint," he said, after they had discussed the matter and found some action imperative. "I'm not afeard of ye running away an' forgetting your poor owld grandfather. I've teached ye better nor that, more by token they can never expect to prosper that wrongs the helpless or the suffering."

"May I drop dead the minute such a thought enters my head!" said Dickie, with energy.

"Best where ye are, Jerry, dear— and get well and take all the comfort ye can, for sure ye've been a blessed friend to me, and made a man of me when I'd have turned out nothing but a jail bird and a vagabone."

The "man," as he termed himself, was then just twelve years of age; but his sentiments, as the reader will admit, were worthy of twice that number of years.

Thus it was that Dickie came to face the world as an independent traveller. He moved over a great part of Ireland in this Way, always sending the net gains regularly to old Jerry, and, on the whole, doing nearly as well as before separation. He almost invariably met with kindness and sympathy, but once he was attacked and robbed of three day's earnings. But in taking the money the wretches took also Dickie's carefully cherished talisman, the broken cairngorm, and by that they were identified and convicted, while the trinket was returned to Dickie, who cherished it and guarded it, with greater faith than ever in its power. He would not have parted with that senseless bit of stone for a twenty pound note, for it was the only link which connected the present with the past, and he never looked at it, as he was wont to declare, without remembering what he might have been but for old Jerry.

"Faith, I believe if I were to lose that stone my good luck would go wuth it," he repeatedly asserted, from which it will be seen that there was mixed up with Dickie's well-doing a spice of superstition, which, however, is not a bad thing when it keeps in the straight path feet inclined to wander.

On one of the rare occasions when Dickie was able to get back as far as Belfast to see Jerry, he found the old grinder unusually weak and worn. Hitherto Jerry had doctored his leg himself, but now it had assumed such a strange appearance that he was glad to have Dickie by his side to advise him.

It had begun to grow black, and, what was more strange, the pain had all gone out of it. Dickie had been doing pretty well on his travels, so he promptly decided that they should call in a doctor.

When that gentleman came, he looked at the leg, and then said, compassionately—

"Why did you send for me?"

"To mend my leg, please God," said Jerry.

The doctor quietly covered up the limb, and shook his head.

"Ye've more need of a praist, good man," he said, shortly, but not unkindly. "No doctor alive will ever make you well."

Dickie felt his heart suddenly grow cold and empty within him; then a revulsion came and he burst into tears. Jerry alone was calm, and even radiant.

"I've been expecting the message," he quietly returned. "Plase the Lord, I'm ready to die. Dickie, avourneen, don't go to sob the heart out ov ye like that. Sure, it's rejoicing ye ought to be that I'm getting rid of all my troubles and pains at wonst; and, blessed be God, it's aisy dyin' when love smooths the pillow. Ye've been a true son to me, and my own hearts blood couldn't have been affectionater. Pay the gintleman for his trouble, Dickie, aroon, and then run for a praist, for I feel the blackness creeping up on me, and when it covers my heart I'll be in Heaven. The Lord is always good; He's kept me alive till I should see you, Dickie, and have you take my hand an' help me over the dark stile."

The doctor would accept of no fee, and Dickie ran oil and got a priest, who came and went, leaving Jerry happy and peaceful, with one arm round Dickie's neck and the other clasping his hand. He had a great deal to tell his young partner, but the most important of all was that he should continue honest and industrious.

"There's some money," he continued, 'in the owld snuff-box under my head. I've tuk care ov it for ye, for ye've earned the most of it, and deserved it all. You'll get all that, and give me a dacent funeral, and keep the rest. It'll maybe start ye in a better way of doing some day; but if the other way isn't the right way, ye'd better pitch the money into the salt say and go on as ye are."

The next morning the blackness crept up on Jerry's tender heart, and Dickie, still clasping the old man's hand and wetting it with his tears, helped him over the dark stile and stood alone in the world.

The courage had nearly gone out of Dickie under this blow; but youth is buoyant, hopeful, and active. After laying the head of Jerry in the grave, and paying every one, Dickie found that he had nearly £20 left, all in good sovereigns, for Jerry had imbibed the national distrust of bank notes. Dickie left the money in safe keeping, and started once more with his grinding machine. It was only when going over his old rounds that he discovered how much Jerry had been beloved and respected— truly another testimony that " honor and fame from no condition rise." Every one had a good word for his memory, and many a tear was shed as Dickie described his peaceful and courageous end. After another year of this wandering in Ireland Dickie crossed to Liverpool, and spent a year in England, at the end of which time he sold his grinding machine, and became a hawker of cheap jewelry.

He was now a smart-tongued lad of fifteen, nicely dressed, and having a good stock, all bought with Jerry's careful savings, and found the new line much more congenial, and quite as profitable as the old. Much of the Irish accent dropped from his tongue, and at length it would have puzzled even an expert to decide his nationality by his speech. As he increased in experience and accumulated capital he was enabled to deal in a finer class of jewelry, which he carried about in a mahogany box, having several lifting trays and compartments, and having on the side a stout leather handle, and on the top a brass plate bearing the words:

Richard Murray,

Licensed Hawker.

Till he was seventeen he never thought of coming near Scotland, and had long since forgotten his mother's features, and given up any idea of seeking her out, or joining his fortunes with her own: but some one then fired his mind with a glowing account of what could be done in his line in some of the towns, and Dickie crossed the border and worked his way to Glasgow, in which city he succeeded well. Saturday afternoon and night were his best times for business, as then the working folks were all free and plentiful of money.

After one of these successful days he had wandered into a big, flashy public-house close to one of the theaters for a last effort before going home to his humble lodging. The place was crowded, bar and boxes, for the theater had just disgorged its contents, and it was near closing time. Dickie sold some of his wares, and then found himself in one of the boxes offering a silver brooch, set with imitation diamonds, to a company of three there seated— two men and a big muscular woman, with some traces of beauty still about her face.

The woman fancied the brooch, and appeared resolved on buying it, but among them they could not muster the price of the trinket, and as Dickie would not abate to their price, the brooch was reluctantly handed back and shut up in his box. The moment he had gone a significant look ran round the three.

"It would be' easily done, and he's quite a boy," said Jess Murray eagerly. "He won't give it for a fair price; if you've any spirit at all, you'll take the boxful."

One of the men. Bob Lynch by name, was indifferent whether they adopted the suggestion or not, and rose carelessly to follow the lad; the other, known as "Jockey" Savage, thought that the boy, as Jess called him, was not such a stripling, and might give them more trouble than they bargained for. They all agreed, however, that it was worth while following him, and, if a suitable spot were found, making the attempt. They left the public-house and separated, one man going on either side of the street and Jess following some distance behind, to assist in any emergency. Dickie's lodging was in a narrow close off the Gallowgate, and they had to follow him thus far before any opportunity occurred for attacking him, as, though he did no business on the way, he kept persistently to the main thoroughfares, thronged with passengers. The moment he entered the close the men exchanged signals and dived in after him. Dickie had scarcely walked twenty yards when a garrotting arm was thrown round his neck, and a snatch made at the box in his hand. But Dickie had not knocked about the world so long without learning something. He held on to the leather strap of his box with all his strength, and at the same time delivered a backward kick at Jockey Savage's shin-bone, which made him slacken his grip and squirm and howl with agony.

As the intended victim made a great outcry at the same moment. Bob Lynch made a desperate effort to bring out a leaden-headed life-preserver; but then Dickie, divining what the motion meant, grasped at the villain's arm with his disengaged band while be tried to pin the other to Lynch's side with his teeth. Just then there was a swift rush to the spot, and Jess Murray snatching the "neddy" from Lynch's pocket, brought it down with a crashing swing on the fair brow of the boy. Dickie dropped like a log, and Jess caught the box as it fell from his hand, tossing the neddy back to its owner and saying—

"You bunglers would take all night to it. Now bolt! . I'll take care of the swag."

They vanished from the spot like magic, and by different routes gained a den further east, known to them all, and peculiarly handy in their present condition, as it was kept by a man who would reset anything— the Great Eastern, even, if any one chose to steal it. Jess was, the last to arrive, with the box hidden under her shawl, and she tossed it down on the table with much pride and satisfaction.

''You hit him twice, Jess," observed Lynch, who was a bit of a coward, and was now very pale and concerned. "I hope to goodness you have not croaked him."

"His own fault if I have," coolly answered Jess. "Turn out the box and see what we've got, and then into the fire with it before the spots come."

The order was speedily obeyed. The stock was of greater value than they had anticipated, but in addition, in the bottom compartment of the box, they found five or six pounds in money, and a bank-book representing a good deal more.

"What a pity! what a pity!" cried Jockey reflectively; "banks are a nuisance—if the money had only been here instead of the book!"

"What's that in the tissue paper?" said Jess eagerly—"a pile of sovereigns, very like. Turn them out— the greedy beggar was as rich as a Jew."

Jockey obeyed, and gave a whistle of disappointment. All that the tissue paper contained was a broken cairngorm stone, with a bit of dirty twine drawn through a hole at the end.

"There's your pile of gold," he said, tossing Dickie's talisman over to Jess. "I hope you like it."

Jess lifted the trinket and stared at it with her face slowly becoming ghastly, and her heart freezing within her.

"I've seen that before!" she slowly whispered, as the men stared at her in awe-stricken wonder and silence. "It was his when he was taken from me. Perhaps it is a mistake— perhaps I have not killed my own bairn. Read— read! you that can read. Read what is on that brass plate on the lid of the box."

Jockey glanced at the plate, and sprang to his feet in horror.

"God alive! it's there!" was all he could articulate.

"What— what? tell me what?" moaned Jess, beginning to clutch at her breast with her hands, and to writhe about like one grown mad.

"Richard Murray, Licensed Hawker," was the awe-stricken response, and only the half of it was heard. Shriek upon shriek went pealing through that rookery. Nothing could check her outcry; she screamed at every one; tore at them like a tiger; denounced them at every gasp and mad exclamation, and finally drew to the spot the police by struggling to throw her two accomplices out of the window.

They were all marched off to the Central— with the reset as a make-weight, and Jess was there put in a padded cell and watched the long night through, or she would never have seen the light of another day. The first thing that helped to soothe her was the news that Dickie was not killed, and, though there was concussion of the brain, he was likely to recover. When he did recover he was allowed to visit her in prison, and put his arms through the bars, and clasp her close and hear her say that she was done for ever with a life of crime.

Jess and her companions were tried shortly after, when she, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the case, and the tearful appeal to the jury of the chief witness— Dickie— got the mild sentence of two years' imprisonment. Jockey and Lynch got ten each, as, by a fiction of the law, Jess was supposed to have acted under their influence.

When Jess was released, Dickie waited for her, and they vanished together.

_________________

3: Billy's Bite

IT WOULD be impossible to enumerate the aids to the detection of crime or the capture of criminals which come to our hands unsought. They are strange, startling, and even awesome; they widen and deepen one's ideas of the unseen laws which govern all that God has made, and seem to cry aloud that every sin is an outrage on a fair and beautiful world demanding denunciation even by those whom we expect to be least inclined to the task.

The boy whose name I have put at the head of this paper was looked upon as a timid simpleton, perfectly under the power of the two men to whom his fate was linked. If Billy had been a dog, they could not have looked upon him with more indifference— he was so small, and thin, and insignificant, and, above all, so quiet and submissive, that they felt that they could have crushed him at any moment with a mere finger's weight.

Rodie M'Kendrick, the first of his masters, was a big fellow with an arm like a giant, whose standing boast was that it never needed more than one drive with his fist to knock the strongest man down. Rodie was a housebreaker who filled lip his spare time by counterfeit coining and "smashing," or passing the same. The other, his companion and partner. Joss Brown by name, I can best describe as a comical fiend— that is, he always did the most cruel acts with a grin or a smile, joking away all the while about the wriggles or agony of his victim, as if it was the best joke in the world to him. Joss, I believe, fairly delighted in the sufferings of others, and would have reached the height of happiness, had lie been appointed chief torturer in an Inquisition. He was an insignificant wretch, but an extraordinary swift runner. These two had settled in Glasgow, for the benefit of that city, and Billy Sloan was their spaniel and slave. There was another spaniel and slave in the person of Kate, Billy's sister, but as she was in bad health, she did not count for much. The two children had been left to Rodie by their mother, a Manchester shoplifter, whom he had brought to Scotland with him, and managed to hurry out of the world shortly after.

They were not his own children, therefore, and that fact encouraged him to deal with them as lie thought fit. Kate was ten, and Billy nearly nine, and both were small and weakly, so Rodie's treatment of them was not the kindest in the world. Kate's ill health had arisen from that treatment in this way.

She had bungled in the passing of some pewter florins made by Rodie and Joss, and, not only got captured— which could have been forgiven— but had almost got these two worthies into trouble as well.

It was a narrow escape, and Rodie thought best to impress it on her memory by first knocking her down with one tap of his big fist, and then kicking her ribs till she fainted. Billy crouched in a corner, clasping his hands, and looking as pale as death, and with his eyes fixed steadily on Rodie's face. Joss, who was looking on in exuberant delight, noticed the peculiar look, and said—

"Look at the other whelp; he looks as if he could bite, if he'd only teeth in his head."

"Oh, him? Poh!" grunted Rodie in supreme contempt, as he rested from his task; but Joss could not resist the temptation, and reproved Billy's look by sinking his nails into the boy's ear, and then shaking him about till Billy thought that either the ear or the head must come off.

Joss made jokes all the while, and then went back to his supper and his whiskey-drinking with fresh zest.

Billy crouched in the corner, watching the slow breathing of his senseless sister till he saw that Rodie and Joss were considerably mollified by eating and drinking. Then he crept forward and lifted Kate from the floor, and bore her into a little closet off the room, in which they both slept. Kate moaned a little on being moved, but it took an hour's persistent efforts on Billy's part to bring her back to consciousness, and then he was almost sorry he had restored her, for she suffered dreadful agony where Rodie's iron-toed boots had been at work.

It is possible that some of her ribs were broken— the dreadful pains and the after-effects all pointed to that conclusion— but though the whole night was spent in sleepless agony by Kate, she was forced to rise next day and attend to her two masters.

Kate was the housewife, and, though Billy would willingly have undertaken her duties for a time, the comical fiend. Joss, would not allow it, and insisted, with many jokes, on pulling her out of bed by the ear with his nails, as usual, and then goading her on to every task which his ingenious brain could suggest, as likely to aggravate her trouble.

The children had no idea of resenting this treatment, or of running away, or of anything but their own utter dependence upon these men; and they longed with all the strength of their young minds for the happy moment which should see Rodie and Joss either senseless with drink or out of the house. It happened, however, that the men were alarmed at their narrow escape of the day before, and had decided to keep out of sight for a day or two; so the children had a weary time of agony and secret tears. At night, when clasped in each other's arms in the hole under the slates, which was their sleeping place, they sympathized and communed, and mingled their bitter tears; but Kate's dreadful sufferings did not abate much. As weeks passed by she grew shadowy and pale, and a bad cough afflicted her incessantly, so much so that Joss was often compelled to rise out of bed in the night time and sink his nails into her ears, or stick a long pin into her arm, or wrench a handful of hair out of her head by the roots to induce her to desist, and give him some chance of enjoying his much needed repose. And the jokes he showered on her and Billy on these occasions would have filled a book. One day both men were providentially out of the house, and Kate, sitting by the fire with her face looking strangely pinched, and her eyes big and shiny, while Billy cooked the dinner by her directions, pressed her hand on her heart, and said to the boy—

"Oh, Billy, is there nothing that would take away this awful pain?"

Billy stopped his stirring at the pot, and reflected. His knowledge was exceedingly limited, and his ideas did not come fast at any time; but after a little his face brightened, and he said, briefly—

"Yes, I know— medicine."

"Are you sure?''

Billy scratched his head. He wasn't sure, but he thought so.

"Then where could we get some?" was Kate's next query.

They both knew of the chemists' shops, but to go to them required money. At length they remembered of some one in the rookery getting medicine and doctor's advice at the Dispensary, and, setting the dinner aside, they decided to slip out of the house, and see what could be done at that blessing to the ailing poor. When they got to the place, and their turn came, Kate went in with great trepidation before a couple of doctors and some students and explained that she was troubled with a cough and pains in her breast and side. Dozens more were waiting, so there was little time to spare upon each.

"What brought it on?" the doctor asked when he had hastily sounded her lungs.

"Caught cold, I suppose?"

Kate blushed and nodded. She did not care to reveal all she had suffered at the hands and feet of Rodie, or she would have told the doctor that far from having caught cold she had caught it very hot indeed. A bottle of medicine was quickly put up and labelled, and Kate was free to depart.

Billy was in high spirits, and danced and pranced all the way home, quite sure that the magic elixir which was to banish all pain from Kate's poor breast was in the bottle she carried. When they got home they found to their great relief that the house was still empty, and after Kate had taken a spoonful of the medicine they hid the bottle away under their bed, lest the comical fiend should jokingly throw it out at the window. The medicine thus applied for and taken in stealth had the effect of soothing the pain somewhat and easing the cough, but it did not stop the decay of Kate's lungs. She got weaker and thinner, till at last even the comical fiend confessed his ingenuity and skill in forcing her out of bed quite exhausted and at fault. Kate spent most of her time in bed in the hole under the slates, while Billy became housewife and nurse combined. Strange thoughts came into her head, and half of the time she was in a hazy dream, through which she saw little but Billy's eager face as he tended, and nursed, and soothed, and consoled, and tried every device for keeping the comical fiend out of the hole. One morning, while Rodie and Jess were still snoring in bed, Kate was more wide awake than she had seemed for a long time, and startled Billy, as she had often done of late, with one of her odd questions—

"Wouldn't it be nice Billy, if I was to fall asleep, and sleep on and never wake?"

Billy stared at her and tided to realize the thought.

"It wouldn't be nice for me," he said at last, "for I couldn't get speaking to you. You'd be same as dead."

"Well, what becomes of folks when they're dead?" pursued Kate. "I heard a man say once that there's another world they go to all bright and beautiful, where there's no pain. I'd like to be there, if there's such a place."

Billy didn't think there was such a place— at least he had never heard of it, and anyhow he did not wish Kate to die. His heart gave a great pang as he thought for the first time of what it would be to be left in the world— alone— without Kate, and he choked and gulped and would have cried, if it had not been that he did not wish to excite or alarm her.

"But, Billy, I sometimes in my dreams see a hole in the ground, with a light shining through from the other side," persisted Kate. "I see it often, and always want to go into it."

"There ain't no such hole," said Billy, sturdily and determinedly.

"There may be if I die and am put in the ground," said Kate, wearily. "Sometimes I'm so tired that I can hardly wake up again. But, Billy, how would I find the road 'to the other place if I should fall asleep and not wake again? I've heard it's not easy found, and I think it's only a place for good folks, and we're not that, you know."

"That's true, said Billy, so you needn't bother your head about going to that place; you're better beside me. You'd never find it; I know you wouldn't."

"That's what I'm afraid of," said Kate, with dreadful earnestness. " I'm afraid I'll be left wandering about in the dark at the other side. I've heard that there's a man with a light shining out of his head walking about ready to take folks' hand and guide them, but he's a kind of an angel, and would never look at me. Isn't it a pity that Rodie kicked so hard? That's what has done it all. And now I'm always sinking. I often catch myself up when I've sunk about half-way through the world, and grip on to your hand just to keep myself here, but if I get much weaker I'll not be able to do that."

Billy clenched his teeth and hands, and said—

"Yes, Rodie did it all. He called me a dog the other day, and maybe I am, for I feel like biting him. Yes, I'll bite him some day, when I'm big enough."

"Could you not help me, Billy?" said Kate, after a long silence. "I'm afraid to go there without knowing something of the road. Couldn't you get some one to tell me how to do when I get through the hole?"

"I tell you there ain't no such hole; and don't
you speak about it, for I don't like it," said Billy, almost in anger; "but if there was. I'd be willing glad to go into it to find the road for you," he added, more lovingly, as he noticed the distressed look which gathered on her pinched face. "Maybe you need a new kind of medicine. I'll ask them to-day when I'm at the Dispensary?"

Billy did ask, and in such a way that the doctor's attention was roused, and he whispered a few words to one of the students, who put on his hat and kindly told Billy that he was going home with him. The student was a tall man, and had difficulty in getting into the hole where Katy lay, but when he did, and looked into her pinched face and brilliant eyes, and listened to her quick, gasping breath, he merely gave his head a slight shake, and knelt down by the bedside to take her thin hand tenderly in his own. He had been very merry and chatty with Billy on the way, but now he was grave and solemn, and scarcely spoke a word.

"Will she be better soon?" asked Billy at last, when the silence had almost sickened him.

The student looked down on the white features of the sick girl, and said— "Very soon."

There was another painful silence, and then Kate dropped off into slumber, with her hand resting trustfully in that of the student. Then the gentleman softly disengaged his hand, and motioned Billy out of the hole.

"Where's your father or mother?" he gravely asked, for the room was empty.

"Not got any— mother's dead," said Billie. "Rodie looks after us," and his hands and teeth clinched, as they generally did now when Rodie was in his thoughts, or at his tongue's end.

"Then I should like to see Rodie for a minute," said the student, with the same pitying look in his eyes, which Billy could not understand at all. "Could you find him now?"

No, no, Billy could not do that; and did not know when Rodie would be at home, or where he was likely to be found. The student looked round the miserable hovel, and sighed and shook his head, and then left. He had ordered no medicine, he had said nothing about Kate, except that she was to be better very soon, yet Billy felt a vague uneasiness and distrust. The house seemed oppressively quiet, and Katy's slumber unusually deep. What if she should sleep on and never wake?

Billy crept into the hole again, and sat down on the floor beside the bed to listen intently to every breath Kate drew, holding her hand softly the while to make sure that she did not slip away from him as she slept.

"Oh, if Rodie had only kicked me instead!" he thought for the hundredth time. "A boy is more able to stand kicks, and Rodie's so strong— he'd kick anybody right through the world, whether there was a hole or not."

Kate in the afternoon Rodie and the comical fiend came in boisterous and gleeful to dinner.

They had been unusually successful in passing some bad florins, and had invested some of the proceeds in drink, part of which they had brought home with them to make a night of it, and laughed consumedly over the manner in which they had cheated one of their victims.

Billy served them passively, and then, unable to taste food himself, he crept quietly back to watch Kate. The comical fiend made some splendid jokes, having Billy for their subject, but for once Billy was undisturbed, for he did not hear them. He sat on the floor, holding Kate's hand, and sometimes he put his other arm softly round her neck, lest his hold should not be strong enough to keep her by him.

The men got very noisy and uproarious; Rodie banged the table with tumblers and the bottle, and shouted and stamped his feet, and then the comical fiend, at his own request, favored the company with several songs.

One smash rather louder than the rest caused Kate to start and open her eyes. She looked up in Billy's face steadily for some moments without moving, and the expression was so strange that in alarm he cried:

"Kate— Kate! don't you know me?"

There was no immediate answer. There was in the slates immediately above them a single pane of glass, which gave light to the closet, and that pane now showed a deep red square of the crimson sky. Kate's eyes wandered to the pane, and became fixed for some moments.

"What's that?" she whispered at last, with a strange, trembling eagerness.

"It's on'y the winder," answered Billy, a little scared.

"No, it isn't; it's the hole you go through into the other world," said Kate joyfully. "Billy, dear, I can't stay any longer. I'm going through!"

Billy threw both his arms around her slight form, and rained his tears upon her face. At the same moment there was a chorus of gleeful shouts and table-smashing like thunder in the adjoining room. It was the comical fiend applauding his own song. Kate continued to gaze steadily at the crimson pane in the roof with a smile brightening on her face.

"I wish— oh, I wish there had been somebody to tell me what to do at the other side," she said at last in a whisper so low that Billy could scarce catch it. "But maybe somebody will hold out a hand to me. I'll keep feeling about for it. It's growing darken Am I going through? and is the light only at the door?"

"No, it's almost night, and Rodie's lit the candle," said Billy. "Do you hear me, Kate? You're awful dreamy and queer— I'm saying it's almost night."

"Night? night?" feebly and hazily breathed Kate. "Goodnight."

Her lips stood still, and her eyes, though fixed on the crimson pane, were strange and big and unearthly. Billy stared at them in awe, and then moved a hand quickly before them to break the steady stare and draw it to himself. There was no response. Her eyes remained fixed on the pane.

"Kate! Kate!" he cried in a scream of alarm.

A slight spasm— almost shaping into a smile— crossed the pinched features; the eyes gazed unwinkingly at the pane— the breath came and went in long-drawn sighs— paused— came again— then paused for ever. Kate had slipped through to another world, where her feeble and groping hand would surely be gently taken by a Guide who himself knew all suffering and temptation and weakness that can afflict frail humanity, and who will surely be as pitiful to the benighted savages of our land as of any other.

Billy screamed, and wept, and threw himself on the still form; and at length even the comical fiend, who had got up on the table to execute a flourishing hornpipe, became annoyed and got down to put a stop to the unseemly disturbance. Rodie, too, who became stupid and sullen with drink just as his partner became lively, roused himself sufficiently to stagger across the room towards the hole, vowing that that if he could only trust himself to the support of one foot he would use the other in stopping Billy's howling.

"Kate stares up, and won't move or speak to me," cried Billy in gasps as he was conscious of the nails of the comical fiend almost meeting in his ear.

"Maybe she's croaked at last," suggested Rodie. "See if she breathes."

Joss hopped in, and soon answered in a gleeful negative.

"It's a good job," said Rodie, "for she'd never have been of any more use."

"Three cheers for her death!" cried the comical fiend, and, as there was nobody to laugh at his joke, Rodie being too sullen, he laughed the required quantity for a dozen people himself.

Rodie tried to kick Billy, but, finding himself unable to stand on one leg, he contented himself with some horrible threats, and then, they went back comfortably to their drinking. Billy cried and cried— softly, so that the men should not hear him— with his arms round the still form, till he fell asleep, and there they lay all night, the living and the dead. Next day Rodie and Joss put all their implements and money out of sight, and sent word to the Poorhouse, and a medical inspector came and glanced at the wasted body, and asked a few questions, and signed a paper, which Billy took to the undertaker, who brought a coffin the next day, and placed Kate's form in it, and then asked if they wished it screwed down. Rodie and Joss were too drunk to reply, but Billy, never tired of looking at the wide open eyes, and fancying they were looking at him, said he should like it kept open as long as possible.

The funeral took place the day after, and there was only one mourner to follow the coffin to the grave— Billy himself, in his ragged jacket and bare feet. The only mournings he had to put on were the tears which flowed down his cheeks all the way. Even when the coffin was hid in the ground, and the earth tumbled in, and the turf spread over the top, he could not put off his mournings, or leave the place chatting gaily about business matters, as is the custom at funerals. He still seemed to see Kate's open eyes shining up at him through earth and turf, and he had a firm idea that she could still hear him speak, though herself unable to reply.

He loitered along after the gravediggers were gone, and stuck a little twig in the ground so that he would know the spot again, and then, when no one was near to see, he lay down on the grass and whispered to Kate through the openings in the turf. He had but two thoughts to reiterate—the regret that Rodie had not kicked him out of the world instead of Kate, and the wish that he might live to "bite Rodie" for what he had done to Kate. Whenever Billy was in trouble after that he came to the graveyard to whisper his griefs to Kate through the turf. He told her of all his adventures and the tortures of the comical fiend and the kicks of Rodie; and though he got no reply, he felt quite certain that he had Kate's sympathy in every word he uttered. Billy's was not a large mind, or a very acute one, but when an idea did get fairly into his head it stuck there firmly. When Kate had been some mouths in the grave, Rodie and Joss prepared a lot of florins— their most successful effort in base coining— and informed Billy that they were going through to Edinburgh to attend the Musselburgh Races on business, and that he was to accompany them, and have the honor of carrying their luggage, an old leather valise containing the base florins. Joss and Rodie, for prudential reasons, went by different trains, and Billy, though he accompanied Rodie, had strict orders to sit at the other end of the carriage, and take no more notice of Rodie than of any stranger.

It chanced, however, that by the time the train drew up at the Waverly Station platform that particular carriage was empty of all but Billy and Rodie, and the base coiner had no sooner glanced along the platform than he uttered an oath and drew in his head with surprising quickness.

"Do you see that ugly brute standing over there, near the cabman with a white hat?" he observed to Billy.

"That ugly brute," was I, the writer of these experiences, on the lookout for any of my "bairns" who might be drawn thither by the race meeting, and Billy quickly signified that he did see me.

"Well, keep clear of him, or we're done for. That's M'Govan, and he's a perfect blood-hound," and Rodie cursed the bloodhound with all his might. "If he gets his teeth on us, we'll feel the bite, I tell ye."

"Ah!" It was all Billy said, and it was uttered with a start, for Rodie's words had suggested a strange idea to him.

''Yes, if he gets us at all, it'll mean twenty years if it means a day," continued Rodie, still wasting a deal of breath on me. "Now you get out first, and go straight to the place I told ye of, while I jink him and get round by the other."

Billy obeyed, and was soon lost in the crowd, while Rodie— who mistakingly believed that his face was as familiar to me as mine was to him— cut round by another outlet, and escaped to the appointed rendezvous.

Meantime Billy had only gone far enough with the crowd to get behind one of the waiting cabs, whence he watched Rodie leave the station. Then he crept out of his hiding-place, and walked back to the spot where I stood, and touched me lightly on the arm.

"I'm Rodie's boy," he said, while I stared at him in astonishment. "I've come from Glasgow with him, and we're going to 'mashing' at the races to-morrow. Would it be twenty years to him if you caught us at it?"

"What Rodie do you mean?" I asked at length. "Is his other name M'Kendrick?"

"That's it; and Joss Brown is with him," said Billy, with animation. "He says you're a blood-hound, and can bite. Twenty years would be a good bite, wouldn't it?"

"Ah, I see, he has injured you, and you want to pay him back," I said, not admiring Billy much, though his treachery was to bring grist to my mill.

"He kicked Kate, my sister, and she died, and I've told her often since then that I would bite him for it, and now I've got the chance, I must keep my word."

I took up Billy into one of the waiting-rooms and drew from him his history. Billy told the story much better than I could put it down, though I were to spend months on the task. He showed me also the piles of base florins put up in screws ready for use, and offered them to me. But while he had been telling the story I had been studying the position. I had perfect faith in Billy's truthfulness. The tears he shed over the narrative of Kate's death would have convinced the most sceptical. I therefore explained to him that in order to secure Rodie the full strength of a good bite it was necessary that I should take him and Joss in the act, and if possible with the supply of base coin in their possession. To that end I arranged to see the three next day at the race-course, and explained to Billy how he was to act when he got from me the required signal.

I had an idea that Billy was densely stupid— almost idiotic— and that therefore the scheme would be sure to be bungled, but in this I misjudged the boy sadly. If Billy had been the most acute of trained detectives he could not have gone through his part with more coolness or precision. When I had men ready and dropped my handkerchief Billy quickly wriggled himself out of a crowd and hastily thrust the valise containing the reserve of base florins into the hands of Rodie, who hid the same under his jacket and looked nervously round. The comical fiend helped him. They had not long to look. We were on them like bloodhounds the next moment. Joss was easily managed, but Rodie fought hard, and struggled, and kicked, and finally threw away the valise of base coin in the direction of Billy, with a shout to him to pick it up and run. Billy looked at him, but never moved.

"You kicked Kate, and she died. It's Billy's bite," he calmly answered, when Rodie worked himself black in the face and the comical fiend nearly choked himself with hastily concocted jokes.

The two got the due reward in shape of fifteen and twenty years respectively, but Billy was sent to the Industrial School, and is now an honest working man.

___________________

4:  The Captain's Chronometer.

THE CAPTAIN had come home with honors; that is, he had saved the ship and a very valuable cargo under his care by sheer bravery and indomitable energy, and been presented with the chronometer by the combined owners in token of their appreciation of his labors. That pleasing memento he carried in his pocket, enclosed in a little chamois leather cover to keep it from dust and wear. It was a ship chronometer, and therefore not meant for use on land or carrying in the pocket, but the captain was proud of his present, and especially of the flattering inscription engraved on the back of the case, and had carried it home to show to his wife and family, and any friends he might meet during his short stay.

His ship was at Tynemouth, but his home was in Leith Walk, and about a week of his furlough had gone when he one forenoon met an old friend, and with that gentleman entered a big and respectable public house in Leith Walk to drink and have a chat over old times.

The place was divided into boxes by wooden partitions about six feet high, so customers, though enjoying a certain degree of privacy, could never be certain that their words were not being listened to by others in the adjoining compartments.

Captain Hosking and his friend were too much overjoyed at meeting to think of that, and chatted away in the loudest tones, while a nimble little thief named Tommy Tait, seated at the other side of the partition, swallowed every word. One of the topics was the recent storm and the dangers through which the captain had successfully struggled, and, as a natural result, the chronometer was brought out and displayed to every advantage. The heads of the two friends were close over the valuable present, when that of Tommy Tait cautiously rose over the partition.

"It must have cost a good round sum," said the friend, as he returned the chronometer, and it was carefully encased in the chamois leather cover and returned to the captain's vest pocket.

''Sixty pounds at least," returned the captain, proudly, "perhaps a good bit more. I know they wouldn't give me a shabby present."

Sixty pounds! Tommy Tait's mouth fairly watered as he prudently withdrew his head, and rubbed his hands in gloating anticipation. Such a prize had not come in his way for many a day. But would the captain be an easy victim to manipulate? There was the rub. Had Tommy Tait's line been one of violence he would have had not the ghost of a chance against the captain, who was six feet two in his stockings, broad in proportion, and strong as a lion. But Tommy's was the delicate art of the pickpocket, and had the time been night instead of day, and the captain only sufficiently befogged with drink. Tommy would have felt as sure of his prey as if the chronometer already lay in his clutches. Everything was against him. The captain was drinking only lemonade, and had the look of an exceedingly wide-awake customer besides; the sun was shining brightly, and the streets, he knew, were crowded with passengers. Tommy uttered a few imprecations under his breath, coupled with a wish that all temperance captains might come to a bad end for creating extra risks and dangers to hard-working fellows like himself. Still the chance was there and must not be missed, and what was a thief worth if his genius could not rise to an occasion like that?

The captain was going towards Edinburgh, as Tommy learned from the conversation, while the friend was going to Leith. So much the better. Tommy would have one pair of eyes the less to trouble him. He waited patiently till they had talked their fill, and then followed them out of the shop. They stood for five minutes at the door; but that interval Tommy filled ingeniously up by lighting his pipe at the bar. When the friends fairly parted, Tommy lost all interest in the barman and his dogs, and abruptly closed the conversation and left. As the captain moved on before him with firm and giant-like strides Tommy's heart sank within him. He was a bit of a coward, and he felt certain that if he bungled, and got into the clutches of that powerful man, he would not have to wait long for a sore punishment. Sea captains are accustomed to administer law for themselves, and Tommy's body tingled all over at the very thought of those boots and fists playing about his diminutive person.

The captain wore a pilot coat, the top button of which was fastened. The chronometer, as Tommy knew, was in the right hand pocket of the vest, with no chain or guard attached. There was both a watch and chain in the opposite pocket, but that was only of silver, and had no attraction for Tommy.

The captain gave no chance till Greenside was reached. There a tobacconist's window had been done out with fountains and grottoes, and real flowing water, as a Christmas decoration, and the crowd around it attracted the captain, and drew a sigh of profound thankfulness from the breast of Tommy Tait. The captain was amused and interested, and pressed closer; Tommy helped him diligently. Looking hard at the window and laughing consumedly. Tommy got his fingers under the pilot coat and touched the chronometer. The absence of a chain was a sore trial to his skill, but at length he got the chamois leather cover between his fingers, and had the whole out and into his own pocket like lightning. But, alas, the thing had been so roughly done that Tommy was actually ashamed of his own clumsy work. He felt that the captain had started suspiciously and looked him full in the face, and he concluded that it was time to go. He moved off as unconcernedly as possible for about twenty yards, when the thrilling shout of the captain fell on his ears, and almost stopped the beating of his heart—

"Hi! you! thief!— stop thief!"

Tommy heard no more. Whatever he lacked, he could run with great swiftness, and that wild cry and the thought of the powerful limbs of the man who emitted the words made him put on his most desperate pace.

He dived for the Low Calton, in which he managed to burrow successfully, while the crowd, led by the captain and a policeman who had joined, ran on and did not halt till the foot of Leith Wynd was reached. Not a trace of the fugitive was to be found, and the captain, quite breathless with the race, exclaimed, resignedly—

"Oh, what a fool I've been! Well, that's the last I'll see of my chronometer."

The policeman, by a question or two, elicited the fact that the captain had got a good look at the thief, and promptly advised him to go up to the Central Office and report the case, assuring him that it was by no means uncommon when a case was thus quickly reported, for us to recover the stolen property in a few hours. This friendly exaggeration sent the captain up to the Central, when it became necessary for me to tone down his hopes a little. By the description given of the thief, I recognized Tommy Tait unmistakably, for Tommy had certain peculiarities of ugliness about his figurehead which, once seen, were always remembered, and I firmly assured the captain that I could easily lay hands on the nimble pickpocket in an hour's time, but as to recovering the watch, that was altogether a different matter. I could not pledge myself to that.

"Why, it's the chronometer I want," exclaimed the bluff seaman, looking quite aghast. "I'll give twenty pounds this minute to the man that puts it into my hands safe and sound. What do I care for the blessed thief? Though you got him and gave him twenty years on the treadmill, that wouldn't do me a bit of good."

"There's a chance of getting the chronometer, too, if we get the man," I quietly observed. "Just leave your name and address, and all particulars, while I go and see if I can lay hands on Tommy."

I fully expected that I should get Tommy at some of his usual haunts, and return within the hour, but I was giving Tommy credit for far less ability than he possessed. I chanced to know his favorite hiding-place, and went to that direct. He was not there, and had not been near it for days. All his haunts were tried with alike result. Then, a little annoyed, I "tried back," and discovered the entry and common stair in the Low Calton in which he had burrowed while his pursuers rushed by. Two boys had seen him there, and they testified that he had turned back towards Greenside as soon as it was safe to venture forth; and from that point all trace of him disappeared. I hunted for him high and low, for days on end, in vain; and what added to my mystification was the fact that Tommy's relatives and acquaintances were as puzzled and distressed at his disappearance as I could possibly be.

At first I thought it possible that he might have left the city, but in a day or two had reason to believe that such was not the case. Tommy never went farther than Glasgow or Paisley, and as he had not been heard of or seen in either of these places a queer thought came into my mind. Could it be possible that Tommy had wandered into bad company, and got knocked on the head— in other words, murdered— for the valuable treasure he carried? I note the strange suspicion, not because it turned out to be correct in regard to the loss of Tommy's valuable life, but because the treasure he carried was to bring him trouble quite as unexpected as his disappearance had been sudden. While I had thus been hunting in vain, and Tommy's friends had been almost mourning him as dead, and even ungenerously hinting that I had a hand in his slaughter, Tommy was enjoying the sweets of a well-earned repose in—of all places in the world the last I should have thought of— the Infirmary! he had got hurt, then— run over with a cab or something— in his flight? Not at all. Seized with a fever, then? Neither. He was as sound in body and limb as myself. It was simply this. Before the chronometer had come in his way, Tommy, who was lazy and hard up, had gone to the Infirmary complaining of some imaginary trouble, which the doctor could not understand. His object was to get admitted as a patient, and have a month or two's rest, and retirement from the uncertainties of the thieving profession— to be coddled up in bed. and tended night and day, and fed up with, wine and other delicacies too often denied to the most ingenious malingerer in prison. Tommy was one of those clever malingerers, but he preferred to practice the art in a place where he could at any moment gain his liberty by ending the distressing symptoms of disease.

That was the position. The thought of making the Infirmary his hiding-place came to him as an inspiration. In Greenside he caught a 'bus which took him up to the head of Infirmary Street for a penny. He just managed to get within the gate of the Infirmary when he was seized with such a paroxysm of his trouble that he dropped almost insensible at the feet of the janitor. The house surgeon was summoned, and, as Tommy was too far gone to be removed with safety to his home, he was borne in an invalid's chair to the nearest ward, and then put to bed.

Close to the head of this bed, and below the sash of one of the windows, was a little sheltered cupboard, in which was stowed some of the other patients' clothing, tied up in bundles till they should be needed again.

Tommy's agony was never so bad but that he could look after the folding up of his clothes, and more especially of his trousers, in the pocket of which now reposed a gold chronometer worth at least £60. Such tender solicitude did he evince for these worn and shabby articles, that the attention of more than one person was attracted, and the surgeon sharply demanded whether he had not any tobacco concealed about the pockets, to which Tommy gaspingly replied that he never used tobacco or snuff— a pathetic lie. As soon as the clothes were bundled up and put away in the little cupboard, Tommy had a relapse, which occupied the surgeons and nurses for an hour at least, and effectually banished from their minds all remembrance of the little incident of the clothes.

Next forenoon, when the time arrived for the professors and students to make their round, it was found that Tommy's trouble had all settled in his back and neck, for in the one he had such dreadful pains that he could scarcely lie in bed, and in the other a chronic stiffness which a year or two's rheumatism could hardly have equalled. There was much grave consultation around his bed, and Tommy tried hard to learn the result of the deliberations, for he had a wholesome dread of being scarified on the nape of the neck with hob irons, or cupped on the shoulders, as he had been in the prison hospital for a similar attack; but all that passed was spoken in whispers, and sometimes in a language which Tommy did not understand.

Tommy was left ill at ease on two points. He feared some surgical appliance of a painful nature, and he had fidgetty feelings regarding the safety of his hard-earned chronometer. He never took his eyes oft the door of the little cupboard, except in sleep, and even then the lightest footfall roused him to wakefulness. Then there was a danger of some patient recovering and wanting his clothes, and taking out those of Tommy by mistake.

Tommy fidgetted himself almost into a fever over that possibility, the more so as he had on one side of him an evil-looking cabman, with a face as bloated as a Christmas pudding, who he was sure was a thorough rascal. In the bed on the other side was an innocent-looking Irishman named Teddy O'Lacey, who sympathized with him very heartily, and whom Tommy set down as a born idiot and simpleton.

He had no fear of the fool of an Irishman; it was the bloated cabman he watched and dreaded. After considering the whole matter. Tommy decided that the chronometer was not in a safe place, and that night waited till everyone in the ward was sound asleep, and the night attendant out of the way. Then he nimbly slipped out of bed, opened the cupboard, took out his clothes, and hid the chronometer under his pillow. He could there feel it with his hand almost constantly, and, if any nurses came to make his bed, could conceal it in his hand till they were gone. At all events he felt more comfortable with it beside him, and acutely reasoned that, even if it were seen, in its chamois leather cover it would excite no suspicion, as several patients had watches hanging by their beds or under the pillows.

Another day passed away, and all Tommy's fears had subsided. The professors ordered nothing but harmless physic, and the chronometer was safe under his pillow, so Tommy settled himself to the full enjoyment of his wall-earned repose. He slept soundly that night, and was so refreshed in the morning that he did not immediately think of his chronometer. After breakfast, when he did thrust in his hand, the treasure was gone! Tommy could scarcely believe his own senses. He grabbed wildly under the pillow, over the bed, under the sheet— everywhere; he even forgot in his sweat of mortal agony that he had a stiff neck, and stooped over the edge of the bed to see if haply it had fallen to the floor.

All in vain. The prize had vanished. Worse and worse, he dared not report the loss, for if the chronometer were hunted for and found, no matter who should be the thief, a police case would certainly follow, and Tommy get seven years at least. He looked around. The Irishman was peacefully sleeping, as was his wont; the cabman, on the contrary, was eyeing Tommy in a manner that convinced the latter of his guilt.

"You've got it then?" was Tommy's savage thought. "I'll see if I can't take it back from you. I always know'd that cabmen was thieves, but I hardly think they'll match a professional."

The day passed away, and the hour for visitors arrived, bringing Teddy O'Lacey's wife, who spent an hour with her husband, and was introduced to Tommy, and departed, hoping that he would soon be well.

Tommy paid little attention to her kind words, for all his powers were concentrated on the cabman. He watched the man till his very eyes became telescopic, and gloated over the fact that the scrutiny was evidently painful to the suspected one. After the gases were lit his patience was rewarded by seeing the cabman partially take from under his pillow something in shape of a watch enclosed in a chamois leather cover. The sight was too. much for Tommy.

He sprang out of bed, forgetful alike of pains in his back and stiffness of neck, and pounced on the watch with a cry of joy.

"That's my watch, you plunderer!" he shouted, but to his surprise the cabman resisted stoutly, and stuck to the watch, dealing Tommy at the same time several blows, which sent him reeling back on his bed.. The man was big-bodied and strong; such an unequal contest could never be maintained by Tommy; so he snatched up a kind of tin flagon, which stood handily near, and hurled it at the cabman's head, closing up one of that patient's eyes and scattering the contents all over his bed. Up sprang the cabman, and the next moment Tommy knew what a real pain in his back meant, for his breast bone had nearly driven the spine out of him through a tremendous blow from his opponent. The din of the battle, the shouts and imprecations, and the cries of the other patients, brought a number of nurses and attendants to the spot; and at length the combatants were torn apart and some explanation offered. Each accused the other of being a dastardly robber in attempting to steal a watch.

The cabman stated his case, and proved beyond question that the watch he held was his own—a silver lever, with his initials engraved on the case. Tommy had then very little to say, except that he had been robbed of a watch, which no one had ever seen, and which was certainly not in his possession when he entered the Infirmary. On the whole. Tommy looked and felt rather foolish, and not even the sympathy of Teddy 0'Lacey, who warmly took his part, could quite convince him that he had not done a rash thing. This fear was confirmed when the house surgeon came round and audibly commented on Tommy's astonishing agility and freedom from pain during the encounter, and ended by saying—

"I'm afraid you're an impostor and malingerer, but we'll see to-morrow when the professors come round."

Morning came, and Tommy was sternly asked whether he would rise and put on his clothes and depart, or wait till a policeman was sent for to assist him from the place. With a deep groan Tommy chose to leave the building unaided. It cut him to the heart to make the decision, for had he not been robbed of the chronometer, and was he not thus putting himself further than ever from the thief? O'Lacey, the simple Irishman, almost wept in sympathy with him, and hoped they would meet again when Tommy was free from all such persecutions and wicked companions. They wrung hands pathetically, while the cabman, with a broad poultice on his eye, audibly wished that he might be present at Tommy's execution.

When this affectionate adieu was taking place, I was entering the gate of the Infirmary with no thought of Tommy in my mind, but intending to see a miserable girl in another part of the building. I wished to see this girl, with the chaplain by my side, and had to get that gentleman before going further. When this had been arranged, we crossed the quadrangle together, so intent on the subject of conversation that, when Tommy appeared before me, I look him full in the face without seeing him, and should have passed on had he but been as inattentive as myself. He made sure I had come for him, and dashed away down the steps towards the Surgical Hospital, A high wall surrounded the building, covered with iron spikes, and facing the High School Yard. A ladder left by some workmen stood near, and Tommy pounced on that as a godsend, bore it to the wall, and was up like a monkey before I could reach the spot. The ladder was short, and he had to reach up and grasp the iron spikes to hoist himself up. As he did so, the rotten and rusted iron gave way, and down he flopped at my feet with a sprained ankle, a broken leg, and many more pains and aches than he had simulated for the past few days.

He was carried into the building, and his leg set, and then I told him to be ready to accompany me as soon as he was able to leave the establishment. He would say nothing regarding the captain's chronometer, but one of the nurses chanced to speak of the battle, and his strange accusation against the cabman, and I gradually pieced the facts together well enough to clear up all mystifications but one— that was— where was the chronometer?"

The cabman had it not; and every other patient and crevice in the ward was searched with a like result. I firmly believed that the chronometer had never been in the place, and that the charge against the cabman was only some eccentric ruse on Tommy's part to draw our attention from the real hiding place. I visited him occasionally during his stay in the Infirmary, and at length, when he was able to move, took him with me and had him charged with the theft. But here an awkward circumstance arose, apparently to defeat justice. Captain Hosking had gone off to sea again before my capture of Tommy, and was not returned, so that Tommy's identification could not be made. There was nothing for it but to remand him, when he kindly came to our help by confessing all that I have put down. But he insisted most religiously that he had been robbed of the chronometer during his sleep, and, as one of the nurses had been discharged on suspicion of having pilfered from a dead patient, I lost a deal of good time in ferreting after her. She proved to be innocent, having been out of the building on that particular night, and I was left as far from success as ever. A chance remark of Tommy's about the "simplicity" of Teddy O'Lacey, drew my attention to that patient, and one day when I was in the building I walked to the old ward to have a talk with him. He was gone and his bed occupied by a new patient. I got an outline of his address, and began hunting for him in the West Port. While making this tour through one of the worst rookeries in the place, I met a Roman Catholic priest well known to me, and hailed him at once with the question—

"Do you know one Teddy O'Lacey?"

The face of the priest became grave in a moment, and he appeared to me to think well before he answered.

"Who are you after now? and what do you want with O'Lacey?" he slowly asked when he had done thinking.

He was a keen-eyed, intelligent man, beloved as much for his acuteness as for his benevolence, and I saw that his eyes were reading every line and expression of my face— much as I had seen those of an anxious mother do when I have asked for her son.

"Never mind what I want, but tell me where he lives," I laughingly replied. "I want to see him, if you will know."

The priest made no answer for a full minute.

"Mr. M'Govan," he said at last, with a tremor of deep feeling in his tones, "perhaps I know what you're seeking, and perhaps I don't. But answer me one question— do you believe me? can you depend on my word of honor as a Christian gentleman?"

"From my soul I can!" I warmly responded, grasping his proffered hand.

"Well, then, take my advice, and don't show your face in that land to-day. If you do, I think what you seek will be destroyed. Wait another day and I will try to help you all I can. The man O'Lacey has been very ill, and he believes it's the visitation of God, which I do myself," and he lifted his hat and looked reverently upwards. " Will you have patience for another day, especially- when I assure you, on my soul's salvation, that by going there now you will not get, and never see, what you're after?"

"I will," I answered, after revolving the proposition for a moment or two, and so we parted.

Next day a starch-box, wrapped in brown paper and addressed to me, was handed into the office. Inside, in many folds of paper, was the captain's chronometer, in its chamois leather cover, bright, beautiful, and perfect as when it left the maker's hands. Pinned to it was a paper, on which was badly written these words—

"A contrite sinner restores what was wickedly stolen, and lifts a mighty load off his mind."

I smiled, and though I made some inquiries after O'Lacey, they never came to anything. Tommy Tait was duly identified by the captain and sentenced to seven years' retirement, the captain getting back his chronometer, and saying and doing some handsome things on the occasion.

_________________

5: The Changed Diamond Brooch

A STRUGGLING clothier had been forced into bankruptcy, through one of his creditors being more exacting and determined than the rest, and the diamond brooch was one of the articles sequestrated. About this diamond brooch there had been much angry disputing before it had been produced and included in Alexander Ford's effects. The bankrupt insisted that the jewel— which contained some fine stones, and was valued for the creditors by an experienced dealer at £80— did not belong to him, but to his sister, but it was clearly shown that when in difficulties Ford had pawned the brooch for £30 and used the money in his business, and, as some of the creditors professed to place no value upon his oath, and hinted at a case of fraudulent withholding of estate, his protests were gradually silenced, and the brooch was uplifted from pawn by behoof of the creditors. The man with whom the brooch had been impawned was a jeweler, and he offered £60 clear for the jewel, but the creditors believed that more could be got by its sale in public, and declined the offer. Much of the mystification which followed hinged upon this offer. The jeweler was certainly a man above suspicion, and had made the offer merely in the way of business, but the fact remained that he had shown a desire to possess the brooch. He had also retained it in his possession till the day before the sale of the sequestrated estate, when it passed into the keeping of the auctioneer, who was also a man above suspicion, and who knew little or nothing about jewelry. The jeweler chanced to take the brooch with his own hands to the auctioneer, from whom he received a cheque for above £30. The brooch thus received was locked in the auctioneer's safe for the night and not taken out till next day, when it was displayed under a glass-case and in safe guardianship till the hour of the sale. About an hour and a half after the sale had begun, and when the crowded roomfull of people had been warmed up into a suitable state of excitement and recklessness, the auctioneer brought forward the diamond brooch. He leant over his desk and took the brooch from the velvet-covered tray of the assistant; he held it up to the light and turned it about to show the sparkle of the stones, and then, after descanting on their beauty and rarity, he said, emphatically—

"This brooch is worth £80— perhaps a hundred. At least it is valued at that figure
by Mr. M—, the jeweler, and, if any one in Edinburgh knows the value of diamonds, he does. That is the selling price, whatever it may bring here. It must be sold— and you can make what offers you please; but I guarantee it to be of that value. I stake my reputation and honor on that. Take a good look at it, ladies and gentlemen; it is worth the trouble. And take time to see it properly. Take it round, James, and let every one see it thoroughly."

The assistant obeyed, and the examination lasted some minutes. Many good judges and experts were present, and some of these examined the brooch closely, and quite endorsed the statement of the auctioneer.

After passing round the front row, the brooch was handed back to some ladies in the second row, and by them passed along to some others desirous of examining the jewel, after which it reappeared at the end of the row and was replaced on the velvet-covered tray, on which it sparkled temptingly, while the bidding ran up rapidly from £30 to £50. At that stage there was a falling off in the number of bidders, but a little persuasive talking from the auctioneer set one of the halting ones going again, and the bidding slowly mounted to £63, beyond which it would not stir. At £63 accordingly the brooch was knocked down to a gentleman who was so well known that he was allowed to take the brooch from the tray with his own hand and carry it away with him, without the necessity of paying for it on the spot.

It happened that this gentleman— whom I may name Mr. George Barclay— had a friend a jeweler, or a judge of precious stones, and, like every one who fancies he has got a bargain, he took occasion shortly after the purchase to submit the jewel to his friend for his opinion.

The expert examined the brooch closely for a moment or two, smiled quietly, and then handed it back to the owner without a word.

"Well, what do you think of it?" impatiently demanded the owner.

"Oh, well, it's rather nicely got up," was the careless answer.

"I know that; my own eyes told me so before I bought it," impatiently pursued the owner; ''but what do you think it is worth?"

"Worth? Well, as to that, there's about £2 worth of gold in it," coolly answered his friend.

''Yes, but the diamonds; they give it its chief value; what are they worth?" continued Mr. Barclay, at last getting concerned.

"Diamonds? You don't mean to tell me that you bought these for real diamonds?" exclaimed the expert in pity and surprise.

"Indeed I did, and paid a high price for them too," answered Mr. Barclay. "Is there anything wrong with them?"

"Nothing; they are good French brilliants— that is, imitation diamonds, which might deceive some, especially by gaslight, but they are not diamonds. Look at them—that is not the penetrating sparkle or flash of a real diamond, is it? "

"Well, I must say that they do not seem so brilliant as when I saw them first," answered the owner, looking blank indeed, "but they are guaranteed, on soul and honor, to be real stones, and the brooch cost me £63."

The expert whistled aloud.

"You're done—  miserably cheated. Who sold them?"

"I bought them at an auction, but they were warranted by M—, the jeweler, and the brooch valued by him at £80."

"I thought so. What could you expect at an auction?" contemptuously answered the expert. "Auctioneers are the greatest liars on the face of the earth. They'll say anything to force a sale. I don't believe M— ever saw the brooch. If he did, and said it was worth £80, he is either mad or blind."

"I heard that he himself offered £50 privately for the brooch," persisted the owner more mystified than ever. "The brooch had been pawned with him for £30 by Ford, the clothier. It was at the sale of Ford's things that I bought it."

"He offered £50 for it, and had it in his possession for some time?" inquiringly exclaimed the expert. "Oh! then I think I understand it all now—and yet he is said to be a sterling and honest man; I can scarcely conceive it possible."

"What possible?"

"The stones have been changed by somebody if they ever were real enough for him to offer £50 for the brooch. You had better see him yourself. Very likely you will find the whole story a fabrication, and discover that M— never saw the brooch before."

Quite horrified and indignant, Mr. Barclay begged his friend to accompany him, and in half-an-hour they stood before the jeweller.

"I bought a diamond brooch at the sale of Ford's things," began Mr Barclay in a tone of suppressed excitement. "Is it true that you saw the brooch and valued it at £80?"

"Perfectly true," calmly returned the jeweler. "It cost you only sixty guineas, I believe. You got a bargain, sir."

The other expert laughed and produced the brooch.

"Do you really mean to say, Mr M—, that that is worth £80?" he cried, holding the jewel up to the light. "Look at it again, please."

The jeweler glanced at the brooch, then started and took it into his hands, and then, with a face of iron, handed it back.

"I did not pass an opinion on that thing," he stiffly observed. "That is not the brooch which was in my possession, though the other was of that pattern. Any one could tell with his eyes shut that these are only paste."

"You had the brooch in your possession?" cried Mr Barclay, hastily. "Then, sir, I believe that the stones have been changed by some in your employment."

The jeweller flushed with anger, but restrained himself.

"You are mistaken, sir. The brooch was in my keeping, and no one else touched it till I placed it in the hands of the auctioneer. The stones in it were then real. But do not distress yourself on the point, for the brooch itself is not the same. It is but a clumsy imitation. If you bought this as the brooch which I had, apart from the question of value altogether, you have been cheated. The one I had was of Continental make; this has been made at home. The gold is good enough, but the brilliants are paste."

"That cheating scoundrel! that rogue of an auctioneer!" was Mr Barclay's exclamation, as a new light appeared to dawn upon him.

"What a villain! what an ingenious fraud he has planned and executed! He has had the brooch imitated, used your name to guarantee its value, and swindled me out of nearly £60. I will have the law on him, though; I'll transport him for it. It is worse than housebreaking or pocket-picking."

"I do not believe he would engage in such a daring crime," quietly and firmly observed the jeweler. " He is an honest man, and as truthful as an auctioneer can afford to be. Moreover, he does not need to engage in such a mean robbery for the sake of a paltry sum like that. But that there has been a fraud no one can reasonably doubt. You have been deceived and swindled shamefully, but who the swindler is remains to be discovered."

This opinion did not move Mr. Barclay. He was convinced that the auctioneer was the rogue, and left the shop in great excitement to accuse that gentleman of the fraud. They found the auctioneer, and produced the brooch, stating hurriedly the facts as I have laid them down, when there followed a scene which made the owner almost doubt his own identity.

"There has been a fraud, undoubtedly," was the answer of the auctioneer, given with wonderful calmness after he had inspected the brooch, but that fraud has been committed while the brooch was in your possession. This is not the brooch which I sold to you—"

Mr. Barclay became nearly speechless with passion.

"What! Do you mean to tell me that I am the rogue?" he at last exclaimed. "The brooch has never been out of my possession since I got it."

"You may think so, but some one more cunning than you has got at it and changed the real brooch for this one. I will tell you how I know. It is not often that I examine closely jewellery passing through my hands, as I know very little about it. But this time I did examine the article, as I had a thought of buying it myself as a present for my wife. Now, I don't know whether you observed it or not, but I can swear most positively that the diamond brooch which I sold to you had some letters scratched on the smooth gold at the back, as if by the point of a needle or a penknife. I cannot be certain now what those letters were, but I think they were M.F. They were quite small, and not very neatly done. Now you don't see any such letters on this brooch, do you?"

There could be but one answer to that, but Mr. Barclay was none the less positive in his assertion that that was the brooch he had bought from the auctioneer. They quarreled very hotly over this point. Mr. Barclay firmly believed that the auctioneer was a rogue and swindler and threatened to expose him if the bargain were not at once rescinded; the auctioneer on the other hand was a wary man, who had seen many clever dodges attempted by people supposed to be far above such tricks, and he as firmly believed the whole to be a plot to extort money from him. He therefore defied Mr. Barclay to do his worst, and declared his intention of reporting the matter to the police.

"We will go together!" cried the customer as sharply, "and if they do not detain you, there is no justice in the land."

Comical though the situation must have looked to an onlooker, the defiant threat was acted upon by both. A cab was called and they drove over to the Central and gave such a garbled and excited account of the mysterious case that I was nearly distracted in listening to their wrongs. In spite of the confusion of tongues, however, it was soon very clear to me that neither of the gentlemen could very well be detained on the wild charges advanced by the other. But on one point they were agreed— namely, that the perpetrator of the fraud should be rigorously hunted out and punished. Seeing them thus agreed, it struck me that a little temporizing might do well, and I said—

"There is a faint possibility, is there not, that the rogue is neither of you?"

They granted the possibility somewhat grudgingly.

"Well, gentlemen, suppose you leave the brooch and the case entirely in my hands, and let me hunt out the swindler without respect to persons, merely giving me all the assistance in your power in the way of information?"

The suggestion was very heartily agreed to, and the two excited men gradually became so far restored to calmness as to be able to converse with ordinary politeness. But they were still positive— very— the auctioneer that he had sold the genuine brooch, and Mr. Barclay that he had bought the spurious one.

It seemed to me that both were a little too confident in their assertions, and that this might prove a stumbling block in the way of my success. On the whole, however, I thought that the auctioneer made out the best case. He had examined the brooch but a moment or two before it was sold, and noticed the letters scratched on the back. Mr. Barclay, on the other hand, admitted that he had shown the brooch to numerous friends and acquaintances, and that it had been often out of his hands, even for half an hour at a time.

For my own part, after I had rigorously examined both gentlemen, I could not form the faintest idea as to how the fraud had been managed, or by whom. One thing alone seemed certain— the fraud had been prepared for. The getting up of a facsimile of the diamond brooch could not have been the work of a few minutes. It implied looking ahead— anticipating a chance of changing the spurious for the real.

Now, the buying of the brooch by Mr. Barclay was purely accidental; indeed, he had strolled into the auction-room by the merest chance, and become the owner of the brooch before he knew well what he was doing. It seemed to me, therefore, by a process of analytical reasoning, that the rogue could never have known in advance that Mr. Barclay was to own the brooch, and thus have prepared to change it while in that gentleman's possession.

Thus I was in a queer mental fix— all my reasoning pointed to the brooch having been changed before it became Mr. Barclay's, while all the facts seemed to indicate that that had been done after the purchase. One statement I thought worth having verified, seeing that it might prove an important feature in the identification of the real brooch— namely, that of the auctioneer regarding the letters scratched on the back of the brooch.

After giving the case a good deal of thought I decided on referring the point to the original owner, the bankrupt clothier, Ford. I found him and his family and sister in furnished lodgings, all his furniture having been seized and sold. He was a mild-looking, pale-faced man, with a look of patient suffering and premature age stamped upon his features. He was nervous, too, and trembled like an aspen leaf all the time I was questioning him. He had a raised, scared look, but whether his palpable fear was caused by his own troubles or the unusual circumstance of being questioned by a detective I could not determine. Certainly, had the brooch gone from him to the auctioneer I should at once have set him down as the guilty one; but it had gone from the jeweler, and he was positive of the genuineness of the stones when the brooch left his hands.

Mr. Ford remembered the diamond brooch very well, and had cause, as he bitterly added, for it should never have gone into the sequestrated estate. It belonged to his sister, although it had been proved that he bought it, the money having been sent from a sweetheart abroad for that purpose, as he might be able yet to prove. Yes, there were some letters scratched on the back. His sister had done that so that she might be able to identify the brooch if it should be lost. The letters were M.F., and stood for Miriam Ford. His sister lived with him, and kept house for him, his wife having been dead for some years.

She was engaged to a gentleman abroad, and would probably leave him in a year or two to be married. Mr. Ford added in a hurried whisper that he would rather I said nothing about the brooch in her hearing, as she had a superstitious idea that it would be unlucky to lose it, and fully expected to get it back again.

"And do you think she will get it back again?" I asked, in a low tone.

A look of utter despair came to his face, and he answered in a whisper:

"Never in this world, I fear. I had some hope of it for a time, but now—" and a woebegone look and shake of the head finished the speech.

I thought I understood the position now. Ford had used the brooch to help him out of a business difficulty, without his sister's knowledge, and now wished to conceal from her the fact that it was lost to her forever. We got the sister away on some trifling errand, and then I said to him:

"Do you know that a most ingenious crime has been committed in connection with that brooch?"

I meant to have said more— to have given him all the details— but I was pulled up by the ghastly pallor which quickly overspread his face.  Had he been ordered out for instant execution he could not have shown more abject terror.

"No, I don't know," he stammered, but his whole manner belied the words.

"Some one has substituted for the real brooch a spurious one of sham diamonds."

"Indeed!" he gasped, looking ready to sink through the floor. "I hope you do not suspect me," he faintly added, crimsoning to the ears.

"No, that is impossible; as the brooch went from the jeweler's to the auctioneer," I quietly returned, "and the change has been effected since then. I merely wished to know if you could identify the real brooch if it should be recovered."

"Oh, certainly— certainly," he answered, with a great gasp of relief; and then I absently gave him the facts of the case, speculating all the while on his strange agitation. I left him, feeling puzzled, yet far from supposing him the guilty one. A day or two later I returned with full power to arrest him on a charge of being concerned in the fraud. How this arrest came to be decided upon is a curious illustration of how trifles crop up most unexpectedly to assist the puzzled detective.

One of Ford's creditors had been present at the sale, and had there bought a bundle of books for a trifle. In one of these books he found a receipted account which showed that Ford had bought from a dealer in jeweler's materials a certain quantity of gold and a number of French brilliants. A day or two after the discovery this creditor heard of the changed brooch, and instantly suspected Ford to be at the bottom of it.

He first showed the receipt to Mr. Barclay, and by that gentleman it was speedily placed before me. I went to the dealer, and from him learned that, when the gold and brilliants were bought, there had been two at the purchase— a drunken working jeweler named Joe Grant, whom no one would trust or employ, and Mr, Ford himself. Grant had selected the materials, and Ford merely paid the account. No one could tell where Joe Grant lived. He never had a fixed home, and all the tools he possessed could have been carried in his hat. He was a, clever workman, but utterly lost through drink, for which he would have bartered his immortal soul.

When I went to take Ford he was very quiet, and trembled less than on my previous visit.

"You won't believe me, of course, but I am quite innocent," was nearly all he said till he got before the Fiscal, when he made a long and apparently frank statement to the following effect:—

When the diamond brooch had been absorbed by the creditors as part of Ford's estate he wrote off at once to his sister's sweetheart abroad requesting him to send a written affidavit to the effect that the brooch was a present to Miriam Ford, paid for by him, though bought in Edinburgh by her brother.

Meanwhile, pending an answer, his sister discovered that there was a danger of the brooch being sold and lost sight of, and she became so distressed on the subject that her brother in an unguarded moment promised to get it back. As he had no money, and could raise only a few pounds among his friends, he determined to call in the services of Joe Grant to make up a brooch for her exactly resembling the real one, which he had once or twice repaired. Grant jumped at the offer of the work, and the materials were bought and the brooch begun. But it was difficult to get the besotted wretch to work steadily, and even when the brooch was finished, as difficult to get it out of his hands.

A good deal of money had been advanced to him in small sums,, but Joe Grant suddenly disappeared, taking the brooch with him. The day of his disappearance was that following the day of the sale of Ford's effects. Ford, after making this statement, added most positively that he never designed or in any way engaged in the fraud of the changing of the brooches, and declared that fie had no idea how or when that had been accomplished.

Few of us credited this strange statement, and I thing I doubted it more than any.

"My sister imagined that, if that brooch were sold or lost to her, her sweetheart's love would die away, and that was what prompted me to have another made," was his assertion, but that seemed to me so ridiculous as to be scarcely worth listening to.

However, we had now advanced a step, and I got a description of Joe Grant, and began to hunt for him. An idea of how the fraud had been managed in regard to the change of the brooches dawned upon me by accident one forenoon when I chanced to call on the auctioneer. A sale was going on, and some small articles were being passed round on a tray. While this was going on the articles were more then once out of sight in the crowd.

How easy it would have been for a man like this drunken jeweler to have changed the brooches in this room under the very eyes of the auctioneer, was my reflection, and subsequent revelations did not prove the thought to be quite a stupid one.

Joe Grant had been heard of in Glasgow, and I went thither to look for him. He had sold some gold, beaten into a large ingot, to a jeweler for whom be had once worked. The ingot had been melted up, after being shown to the police, and used in the course of the man's business, but in the degree of purity it tallied exactly with that of the real diamond brooch. At another dealer's Joe had sold one small diamond, which he declared was taken from a breast-pin of his own. That small stone was to be his ruin. It is true it was utterly impossible to indentify the diamond as one of those in the original brooch, but the man who had bought the stone, to whom Joe was well known, had seen the drunken fellow a day or two after, and lent him a shilling, upon which occasion Joe told him where he was living, and hinted that he would soon be in a position to repay the trifling loan.

I went to the place, but Joe had gone out on business, which business I discovered was to call upon another jeweler, with whom he had left another unset diamond, with a view to it being bought. The diamond had been bought, and Joe was not difficult to find after that. I had only to go straight to the nearest public-house, and there I found him, bright-eyed and happy as a king, with a half-mutchkin of whiskey before him, and on his head a hat of which a scarecrow would have been ashamed. He took off the hat, if I may so name the fragment, to make me a deferential bow when I introduced myself as anxious to see him, but when I gave my name the bit of felt was dropped as if it had burned his fingers, and, quick as lightning, Joe brought something out of his pocket wrapped in paper, and cramming it into his mouth, was about to make a swallowing gulp, when I threw myself over the little table which separated us and throttled him as I never tried to throttle any one. I had remembered the fashion of the Chinese with their fishing cormorants in fastening an iron ring about their neck to prevent them swallowing the fishes they capture. My iron ring was formed of my ten fingers, and it succeeded perfectly. Joe became black in the face, his jaws opened, his tongue protruded, and the little paper of unset diamonds dropped out and fell at my feet.

That was my fish, and, when I had secured it, I took the cormorant away with me, and the same night had him in Edinburgh.

He was identified by the auctioneer's assistant as one of those who had been in the saleroom and who had fingered the diamond brooch while it was being passed round, and with that and some other evidence we had such a strong case that Joe decided to plead guilty. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but two months' separation from whiskey sufficed to lay him in the prison burying corner.

Ford was released immediately upon Joe making a clean breast of it, and thus confirming the clothier's declaration. Curiously enough the presentiment of his sister as to losing the brooch became true. Her sweetheart's love did die away, and she never joined him abroad or married, but to this day acts as housekeeper to her brother. I daresay such changing of love into indifference or loathing is common enough even where there are no diamond brooches to get lost.

________________

6: Betty's Bracelet

IN GOING THROUGH one of the fashionable crescents at the West End very early one morning, the night policeman noticed a single window on the second flat of one of the big houses wide open. All the other windows were closed and shuttered as usual, but this one had the sash raised high, and the blind idly flapping outside. It was just dawn on a mild summer morning, and the man, though he had passed the house more than once during the night, had not noticed the open window in the darkness.

Now in the brightening dawn he stood staring at it, uncertain what to think or how to act. There was a railed area flat below the window, but it was possible to place a long ladder on the copestone inside those railings and against the wall of the house and thus reach the window.

After considering the case, the man rang the bell violently till he succeeded in rousing the servants. There were three in all, and they ran down half dressed, thinking that the house was on fire, and scolded the policemen roundly for disturbing them about such a trifling matter as an open window. Trifling matter?

When the rooms were examined, it was found that plate, jewelry, and soft goods had been removed to the value of £200. The thieves had gone about their task with the utmost coolness and precision, which implied either extraordinary experience or a thorough knowledge of the premises and the habits of the inmates.

Only the first and second flats had been entered— the bedrooms above and the servants' attics being avoided— but these had been ransacked with business-like skill. It is not common in cases of this kind for housebreakers to burthen themselves with soft goods, but here was an exception. They had taken tablecloths, curtains, linen, clothing, and even boots. The bundles of these alone must have been of no small size and weight, yet the only visible entrance and exit of the thieves had been that raised window-sash on the second flat.

That was the point which puzzled me. It was quite unlike the style of experienced housebreakers such as they appeared to be. It implied the risk of bringing a heavy and cumbrous ladder through the streets at night, the risk of leaving that ladder against the wall while they were within, the bringing out of that window and down the ladder of their big bundles, and the conveying away of the whole in the short interval of the night policeman's absence. I could conceive such a performance possible had there been a gang of four or five at work, but the laziness and recklessness of the tribe were all against such a course. Then, supposing that they had found it necessary to enter by the window, there was no reason why they should not have left by the main door. It was secured by two bolts and two locks, the keys of which hung on a nail close by, quite within their reach. And when they had accomplished all so noiselessly, why should they not have closed the window after them, so as to delay the alarm as long as possible? It appeared as if they were anxious to proclaim aloud— "We came in by the window, and we left by the window— behold the proof!" The hint was too transparent, but what was it intended to cover?

A knowledge of the premises could only have been got in one way, and I began to question and examine the three servants. I made no progress in that way. They appeared all innocent enough, and had no followers of dubious character. The only thing I remember noticing was that one of them— the housemaid, a smart-looking girl named Betty Baxter— spoke with a Glasgow accent. To Edinburgh ears that accent has a thievish or 'keelie-like" sound, and I firmly believe I questioned that girl more closely than the others merely on that account.

She had been only about six weeks in the place, but came well recommended, having certificates of character from no end of former mistresses. She had been the last to be roused by the furious ringing of the policeman, and the loudest in scolding him. She was a smart girl, Betty— just a little too smart, I thought. Her answers appeared too ready, and she was never taken aback by a question, however suspicious.

"If it were necessary," I remember thinking, "that girl could lie through a brick wall;" but that fact did not necessarily connect her with the robbery.

From the servants actually on the premises I went back to those who had left at the preceding term, and thought I had got a clue. One of them had been put away on suspicion of pilfering from her mistress and from the other servants, and I spent a deal of time ferreting after her, trying to discover her whereabouts and the characters she was now consorting with.

I had an idea that if I found her and her associates I should not be far from the house-breakers: but all my work only proved that the girl had first gone homo to her mother's house, and then, after spending a week or two in a strange town hunting for a situation, had gone off as a free emigrant to Queensland. Clearly, then, if she had given the information upon which the thieves acted, she was now far beyond our reach. At that stage a curious accident led to a discovery, for which we got a great deal of undeserved praise. A publican's wife had run away with a bottler in her husband's employ, and taken with her a number of articles of jewelry and clothing, to say nothing of money belonging to her husband. It was supposed that the runaways had made for Glasgow, with the intention of getting across to Ireland, and before copies of their likenesses could be sent thither the Belfast steamer was boarded by the police, armed with the proper warrant.

The runaways were not found, for at that moment they were sailing out of the Mersey for America; but in turning over the boxes and luggage of the passengers, there were found a green painted box and crate, or basket, which had no name upon them, and which no one claimed.

This luggage was hauled out from the rest, and the passengers were all mustered and called upon to claim it, but in vain. Accordingly the box and crate were removed on shore, and opened in hope of discovering the publican's treasures, then gliding safely out into the Channel. The result was the discovery of nearly every article which had been taken from that house with the raised sash. The crate contained the soft goods, and the green box the plate and other articles of greater value.

Immediately on the discovery being made a telegram was sent to Belfast to have the steamer searched for suspicious characters upon its arrival, but this resulted in no capture. If the owner had really been on board he probably had left whenever the box and crate were taken possession of by the police under the impression that it was these the men had been after. A spirited paragraph appeared in all the newspapers next day describing the "clever recovery of stolen property," and praising us to the skies for our acuteness and skill. Of course we laughed as heartily in our sleeve at the press's praise as we had often done at its censure.

The impression left on the minds of the men on board the steamer was that the box and hamper had been brought on board by a small, thin-legged fellow with close cropped hair, and their description of the man led to nothing at this time, though it was to prove useful after.

The most valuable part of the plunder was recovered, and the public were satisfied that we had done our duty, and so the matter rested.

A month or two later there came a report of a somewhat similar robbery at a comfortable country house about two miles from the city. As in the first case, the place had been securely fastened at windows and doors on the first fiat, but a window on the second was found open, this time with a ladder brought from an adjoining garden leaning against the wall close by. With the first news of the robbery I went out to the place. It was a good old house, occupied by a wealthy widow, whose fine plate and curiosities had suffered woefully by the invasion.

A noisy brute of a watch-dog kept me from the door till a servant, attracted by the barking, ran out to rebuke him. When the dog had been kicked into his kennel by this girl, she turned to me to receive my message, when, to my unbounded surprise, I recognized my former smart acquaintance with the Glasgow accent, Betty Baxter.

"What! You are here, too?" I unguardedly exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, sir," she answered, with the greatest readiness, and not in the least abashed. "Isn't it strange that this place should be entered by robbers, too? I left the other place in fear that they would come back— and that, you know, would have frightened the life out of me; but there seems to be thieves in the country as well as the town."

"So it seems," I dryly returned, "and they have the same style of working as the town ones. Perhaps they're related to each other."

She did not blush nor show the least confusion, though it was clear to me that a girl with such a quick eye as she was blessed with could not but see my meaning. I went over the house with her and her mistress, and accompanied by another servant girl—a quiet-looking lass of eighteen or so, named Maggie Black— and found that very much the same system of robbery had been practiced as at Betty's first place.

The window appeared to have been the only means of ingress and egress, the front door and lower windows being left untouched in bolt, lock or bar. During the examination I was thinking not so much of Betty as of the watchdog, which had howled and barked and created such an uproar upon my arrival.

How had the invisible thieves placed a ladder against the wall close to that brute's kennel without rousing him, when my footfall made him nearly strangle himself in the desire to gobble me up? I was not wishing the beast dead, but rather that his long red tongue could for a minute or two be endowed with the gift of speech.

The stately old lady who had been robbed was in a state of great excitement, and had no sooner shown me over the place than she conducted me to the parlor, and, closing the door after sending down the servants, desired me to give an opinion on the robbery. I evaded the question, and talked of other matters for a few minutes, and then suddenly and noiselessly rose, crossed the room, and threw open the door.

I was just in time as I looked out into the lobby to catch a glimpse of a servant's cap and dress disappearing swiftly below.

"What is the matter?" demanded the widow, anxiously.

"Nothing— only I fancied I heard some one breathing outside the room door," I quietly returned. I said nothing of Betty Baxter, though I felt morally certain that the smart cap and spotless print dress which had just vanished belonged to her, and her alone. She feared me then? She, too, had been anxious to hear my decision? It might be mere feminine curiosity, but I was inclined to think otherwise. I left the house and returned to town to report, but I took care to leave orders that either of the servant girls attempting to leave the house should be detained or handed over to the county police.

I did not give Betty credit for half the ingenuity she possessed. Besides, if she had only known it, she had little to fear from me even supposing she had 'put up" the robbery for some gang. How could I possibly connect her with them? Luckily for justice all the points in their favor do not occur to the guilty; and where their position is already impregnable they hastily try to make it more strong, and so bring down the whole about their ears. Betty's wits had not been idle during the two days which elapsed. She and the other servant, who was quiet and religiously inclined, had never agreed well since she came, and I was no sooner out of the house than Betty sought her mistress, and threw out several mysterious hints to the effect that the robbers might be found a great deal nearer home than Mr. M'Govan expected. Being called upon to explain her meaning, Betty, upon extracting a solemn promise of secrecy, imparted to her mistress the information that Maggie Black always kept the door of her room— a little corner of an attic, lighted by a trap-window in the slates, about a foot and a half square— locked. At the same time she stated that she had missed several articles of her own which no one but Maggie could have taken. Betty slept in a closet off the kitchen, and declared that she had always kept her trunk unlocked. She could not tell how many things she had lost, but would look through her trunk as soon as she could find time, and report. Next day Betty had her story ready, which was to the effect that she missed a number of articles of wearing apparel and also several trinkets, among which was a silver bracelet, which she had got as a present from a sweetheart. Mrs. Newton, her mistress, at once suggested that she should call in Maggie Black, charge her with the theft, and challenge her, unlock the door of her room, and show its contents; but to this Betty replied that these things were best done before witnesses, and suggested that "Mr. M'Govan, the able detective, who had so much skill and experience in such matters," should be sent for, so as to appear to be accidentally present when the charge was made.

Accordingly Mrs. Newton sent me a note requesting my presence, though that was really not called for, as I was on my way to the house when the note was delivered. The truth is, I had been as busy as Betty, and had unmistakable evidence that the night before a little fellow with thin legs and close-cropped hair had been seen corning from the direction of Mrs. Newton's house. The fellow had been stopped by the county constable, and had asserted that he was a slater, on tramp, and had not stopped near Mrs. Newton's house, a statement which was found to be false when the man was out of reach, for he had not only been seen near the house, but in company with a female wearing a light-colored print dress like that of a domestic servant.

Betty was the first to greet me on my arrival, and she at once became confidential.

"We think," she said, alluding to herself and her mistress, "that Maggie Black knows something of the robbery or those who did it, for we've missed ever so many things, and Mrs. Newton is to demand that she opens her door and shows what's in her box."

"You don't mean me to believe that she has the stolen things in her room?" I said, in no pleasant tone.

"Maybe not, but she has some of my things, for nobody else could have took them," said Betty, determinedly, "and Maggie has owre mony queer characters coming about her."

"And you haven't, of course?"

"No, there's not a lad near here worth looking at," she answered, with a toss of the head, but all the while she was watching me cunningly out of the corners of her quick eyes, and I was saying to myself: "My lassie, the man who catches you napping may call himself clever."

Of course I never calculated upon the minx cutting her own throat, if I may so speak. Her cunning, as I shall now try to show, was of the kind which overleaps itself, and falls on the other side.

After I had been shown into the presence of Mrs Newton, the other girl, Maggie Black, was summoned to the room. She appeared a good deal agitated, but her excitement increased painfully when I read over the list supplied by Betty of the things she had missed, and asked Maggie if she had any particular reason for keeping her door always locked.

"Betty told me to keep it locked," she indignantly replied.

Betty raised her hands and eyes in apparent horror at the statement.

"You are quite sure that you have kept it locked, constantly, so that no one but yourself could enter the room?" I continued, suspecting a plot.

"Oh, yes, quite sure, and there's nothing in it I'm afraid to show," Maggie promptly returned. "Come and see for yourselves."

Nothing could have been more frank than the offer, and we followed her to her little attic, which she unlocked and entered. The place could hardly hold us, and I noticed that the window of obscured plate glass on the slates was opened on the hinge— that is, pushed upwards— to air the little closet. A few dresses hung behind the door. There was nothing else in the room but the bed and Maggie's trunk. I glanced round, and then nodded to her to unlock the trunk.

She took everything out, article by article, accounting for all till she was near the bottom, when she lifted up a parcel in glazed wrapping paper, and stared at it in dismay.

''I dinna ken what this is," she slowly observed. ''I dinna mind o' seeing it before."

I glanced at Betty. Her eyes were gleaming, and there was a ring of pallor round her mouth, the only indication of the intense excitement within. Maggie opened the parcel with a shaking hand, stared at the contents, and then burst into tears.

"I never saw them afore! They've been put in by somebody!" she wailed, with the most piteous exclamations of grief.

Betty pressed forward and leant over as I took up the things.

"That's my silver bracelet," she vengefully snapped out; "and that's my lace collar, and my gloves, and my neck-tie, and my pink ribbon, and my cap," and so she went on enumerating the articles till the parcel was exhausted.

There was another small parcel wrapped in a bit of newspaper lying in the box, and which also Maggie declared she had never seen before; and on opening that I found within one dozen of the finest cambric handkerchiefs and half a dozen pairs of kid gloves of a peculiar Paris make. The whole were highly scented, and in sniffing at them I noticed a monogram worked with pink silk at the corner of the handkerchiefs.

Betty disclaimed all ownership of these articles, and I examined the monogram and made it out to be " M.Y.W." I had been on the hunt for articles so marked not long before, and a flash of memory recalled the circumstances. The plunder recovered on the Belfast steamer had been so marked, and among the articles of that robbery detailed as not recovered were a dozen cambric handkerchiefs and a half-dozen pairs of kid gloves of a particular size and style, received by one of the ladies as a birthday present.

I  looked straight into Betty's eyes as I read out the monogram, and her look of innocent wonder was a study.

"What was the monogram used by your last mistress, Betty?" I quietly asked.

"I don't remember, sir," was her guileless reply. "What! is it possible that she has been concerned in that robbery, too?"

I looked at Betty steadily, but made no reply. Had the case been a little less serious I believe I should have laughed outright, for I was thinking not of Betty and her ingeniously trailed "red herring" so much as of my uncle's monkey and, that the reader may follow the drift of my thoughts, I shall here record Jacko's exploit. The monkey was very fond of sugar, but disliked the strapping which he always got for stealing that luxury. One Sunday, when my uncle had gone to church, Jacko found the cupboard unlocked. The cupboard served as a pantry, and held milk, bread, etc., as well as the sugar bowl.

Jacko entered the press and emptied the sugar bowl at his leisure. Then, to take the guilt from his own shoulders, Jacko got hold of the cat and shut it into the cupboard. He had seen the cat strapped for stealing, but his intellect did not grasp the fact that cats do not steal and eat sugar. When my uncle returned Jacko was seated on the hob at the fireplace, looking hard up the chimney, the picture of innocence.

The press door was opened, the cat ran out, and then the sugar was missed. Jacko was watching the whole of the proceedings with one corner of one eye. The other was solemnly fixed on the sky, up through the chimney. The milk was untouched— the cat having only been on the floor of the cupboard but all the sugar had vanished.

"Jacko!" thundered my uncle, taking down the strap.

Jacko started violently nearly as high as himself, but caved in at once, and darted for his usual place of refuge under the bed, whence he was dragged to receive a double punishment for his ingenious crime.

I looked at Betty and thought of the monkey, for, like Jacko, she had proved too much. In her anxiety to fix guilt on Maggie Black, she had forgotten that Maggie had not been in the place last robbed, while Betty had. These thoughts had scarcely crossed my mind When another discovery nearly electrified me, for by it I imagined I had got another clue such as Betty had never dreamed of giving.

The silver bracelet taken out of the parcel in Maggie's trunk yet lay in my hand. I chanced to turn it over absently and noticed a word scratched inside. I looked closer and made out the word to be "Tim." And as I did so, there flashed upon me the words "Slater Tim!" and my wonder now is that I did not shout them out.

Slater Tim was a little slim, Glasgow fellow, who had been a slater, and got injured in some way, and drifted into a lazier life. I knew that at that moment Tim was in Edinburgh, at a place where I could find him without trouble. The report of the county constable that he had seen a fellow calling himself a slater seemed to fit in so nicely that I could not refrain from saying to Betty as carelessly and innocently as possible—

"What's that written on the inside of your bracelet?"

"Only the name of the sweetheart I got it from," she readily answered. "I can swear to it by that."

"Yes, but what is the word?" I persisted.

"T-i-m— Tim," said Betty, kindly mincing it for my weak intellect.

"What is he, at all?" I carelessly continued, examining the bracelet closely, lest the cunning girl should read anything in my eyes.

Stupid, suicidal Betty!

"A slater!" she proudly returned.

''Imphum. Is it long since you saw him?"

''Oh, yes, a long time," she hastily returned.

The tone— for I did not look up— told me that she was getting wary, and had rejected truthfulness for lying.

"I saw him leave you last night at the foot of the walk," cried Maggie promptly and decisively. "I believe you sent me for the milk half an hour too soon just to have him up at the house while I was away."

"Very likely," was my thought as Betty broke into a storm of denials, "and a nimble rascal like him could easily go along the roof and get in at this window, and insert the things in that trunk in spite of locks," but I kept the idea to myself.

"Would you know him again if you saw him?" I quietly asked of the weeping girl.

"Ay wad I, for I've seen him three times," she readily returned, and then my mind was made up.

I told Betty to get on her things, and also reluctantly decided that I must take poor Maggie with me too, though I so far honored her as to send her for one of the county constables before taking them both away. Betty was silent and defiant in her demeanor, and as bold as brass; Maggie appeared overpowered with grief and shame. I took them in to Edinburgh, and they were locked up. Then I went and took Slater Tim out of his bed, so far gone with drink that he did not know but he was being led out by some boon companion to have a jolly spree, and became quite outrageous when at the Central Office no one ran to execute his order for two gills of brandy.

With Tim I got some trifling articles stolen from Mrs. Newton, but the most valuable and dearly cherished had gone into the melting pot. There was no difficulty in establishing the innocence of poor Maggie Black, and as little in roving Betty's guilt. It turned out that she had originally been led off her feet by the insignificant-looking rascal whom she was serving. Tim was identified by Maggie, and also by the men on board the Belfast steamer, and the whole case was so clear that he and his assistant got five years apiece.

Tim was not strong, and the prison life proved too much for him. He died when he had served only the half of his term. Betty professed great grief and contrition for her past faults after learning of Jim's death. It is possible that her contrition was genuine, and that her penitence and prayers were sincere. I can offer no opinion on the point, but when she was set at liberty, she managed to get some ladies interested in her, and after a little got into a capital place as house-maid— in which work, I am led to understand, she showed real smartness and ability. I should not trouble to record all this but for a curious incident which brought her once more under my notice.

Betty had a terrible tongue, and said some hard things about a fellow-servant, which stuck deep into the woman's mind, and rankled there. Shortly after the woman complained of having missed a number of articles, including a sovereign marked in a peculiar manner, and insisted on Betty's box being turned out and searched. Betty resisted, and a warrant was got. The articles were duly found in Betty's trunk; but Betty, with an energy which never saw equalled, reared herself before her accuser, and solemnly swore the most awful oath that she was innocent. Her assertion, and even the oath, went for nothing. Betty had to tramp. The other conviction was brought up against her, and this time her sentence was seven years. She screamed out her protestations of innocence at the very bar; she held on to the rail with giant strength, and refused to allow them to remove her; called on her Maker to smite her dead before every one's eyes if she was not proclaiming the truth; and finally was forced out in strong convulsions. In prison she would not work, and could scarcely be forced to eat. She became emaciated, sullen, and depressed. Finally she was ordered into hospital as a confirmed invalid, and died there, solemnly protesting to the last that she was innocent of the crime which had sent her there. I believe she spoke the truth.

__________________

7: The White Waistcoat

WITH SUCH CASES as the preceding one before our eyes, it is not surprising that one like the present should stagger and all but trip us up. The appearances of guilt and innocence are so often and so ingeniously simulated that no one but the superhuman detective of fiction could possibly decide between the false and real. In a story these things are easily managed, but in a real case it is very different. In a mystery like the following, were it not for chance clues and odd circumstances, and an instinctive suspicion of every statement and appearance we should generally make a poor show of skill.

The house was a small cottage, down near Comely Bank, was occupied by a bookseller named Peter Cleghorn. This gentleman was a bachelor, and was generally absent at business from the hours of nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, when he spent two hours at dinner, returning to business for a couple of hours or so after. Cleghorn was an easy-going customer, and took little trouble or concern with his house, but left that to his housekeeper, an old woman named Mysie Dodds. Mysie, I was led to understand, was related to her master in some way, and, according to Cleghorn's statement and belief, could have been trusted with the cottage crammed full of gold sovereigns without a single piece being found wanting.

She was a good worker, a good cook, and a splendid washer and dresser, and managed the whole house and expenditure with scarcely a word of direction from her master. She would, indeed, have been the perfection of housekeepers but for one failing— she was very fond of whiskey.

It was in sheer pity for her failing that her master had removed to that cottage, as the nearest public house was almost five minutes' walk from the spot. Cleghorn was a teetotaler himself, and would not allow Mysie to keep a drop in the house, and he fondly imagined that the distance from the public house would make her drink less. There were houses all around them, but no handy grocers or spirit dealers, and Cleghorn flattered himself on the success of his ingenious scheme. He quite forgot, however, that there were other evils and calamities to be guarded against besides that of drinking.

Mysie generally made two expeditions a day to the public house, and always during the absence of her master; and, being a widow and a very precise woman, she always dressed herself for the walk— that is, put on her bonnet and black veil and shawl and gloves. The first of these expeditions was generally in the forenoon, and the length of time consumed depended on Mysie's mood or the state of her funds. If she could have kept a bottle in the house she would have done so, but Cleghorn had discovered her doing so once, and given her to understand the next discovery of the kind would part them.

Cleghorn's dinner was always ready so punctual to the minute, that he made it a point to be at home a little before the hour, knowing from experience that Mysie's temper would not stand trifling with. The first disappointment and surprise in this respect was a startling one.

The bookseller had come home as usual a little before the hour, With pleasing thoughts of the comfortable dinner which awaited him— for he was a stout little man, and fond of good eating— when, to his surprise, he found the front door open, several of the neighbors in the house, a policeman gravely taking notes, and Mysie— Mysie the exact and perfect— gabbling away in a half-sottish condition about the house having been robbed.

There was no dinner ready, and Mysie smelt strongly of whiskey, and was so thick of speech, that the reason was not hard to guess.

"I wasna abune an hour awa,' and when I cam' back the place was strippit," were the first words which greeted her master.

Cleghorn was a rosy-cheeked man, but he turned pale at the words, and instantly made a dart up-stairs for his own room. He was tolerably wealthy, and had a deal of his money invested in railway shares, and the scrip—so easily transferable—was in a drawer in his own room. To his great relief he found the room littered with the scrip, but none of it missing.

The thieves had been there, and had turned out all his valuables, after rudely prying open the drawers, but they had not either known the value of the scrip, or had hesitated to take it. All the ready money, amounting to £15, a silver watch of trifling value, and some rings and trinkets, with the very best of Mr. Cleghorn's apparel, to say nothing of the sheets and napery, were gone. Still more surprising, two capital leather-covered trunks were gone with them. It seemed, indeed, as if the thieves had coolly stripped the house of everything valuable, packed the plunder in the two trunks, and then boldly conveyed them out of the house. Nor was that all, for one of the neighbors declared she had seen them enter and leave the house, and that they came and went in a cab as if they had a perfect right of entry, and were removing their own property. This lady could give no very satisfactory answer to the policeman as to why she thought the thieves had a right to remove the things. She hesitated, looked at Mysie, the house-keeper, and said she had no doubt it would all be explained and made clear in a day or two.

The look might have been meant to imply that the housekeeper was not in a fit state to hear reproaches or to tender explanations, and that the matter had better be delayed till she should be; but, if so, she was mistaken. Mysie had been drinking, and drinking heavily, but she was really more stunned and stupefied than intoxicated. Conscious that she was to blame, and yet unable to say so without incriminating herself in her master's eyes, she took refuge for the most part in useless tears and incoherent lamentations. Another suspicious circumstance was the fact that not an article belonging to Mysie had been taken. Possibly there might be a very good and natural reason for the omission— Mysie's possessions were few.

A few hours later I was on the spot, and then the lady who had seen the things removed spoke out more freely; for, when I asked why she had not interfered or given the alarm, she promptly answered—

"Because the housekeeper was with them. She helped the boxes out, and went into the cab when it drove away. She came back in about half an hour, but on foot, and swaying a little, as if she had been drinking."

This revelation almost took my breath away.

I had already gone over the house, and found that the front door was secured by two locks, both of which Mysie declared to me had been locked on the inside by her before she went out. Either Mysie or the lady before me must have falsified.

"Do I understand you to say that the housekeeper helped the man out with the boxes, and that they entered and left by the front door?" I said, when I had mentally reviewed and compared the statements.

"There was only one man and the cabman, and she did help them out with the boxes; but the front door was never opened, so far as I saw. I did not see them enter. The housekeeper seldom used the front door; she always went in at the side. You can see the door from here;" and the lady pointed to the kitchen door of Mr. Cleghorn's house as she spoke.

"Are you certain that the house-keeper was with them and helped them?— I mean, could you take oath on it?" I pursued, still incredulous; for Mr. Cleghorn had given me the most emphatic assurances of Mysie's honesty.

"I am—positive—certain. I can take oath on that in any Court," was the firm rejoinder.

it hadn't been for that I should have given the alarm at once. My servant saw her too. You can question her if you have any doubt."

The bell was rung, the servant appeared, and I found her statement tallied exactly with that of the lady. I returned to Mr. Cleghorn with my mind pretty well made up as to who was the real, criminal, and only sorry that I had such a painful revelation to make to so good a master. A favorite theory of mine is, that a woman who is a slave to drink will do anything, and here, I thought, was only another instance added to hundreds which had come in my way already. In order to give the misguided woman a fair opportunity of defending herself, I said nothing to her master until she was in the room. She had already heaped abuse on her own head with no niggard hand for giving the expert thieves the opportunity to strip the house, but then her statements had all been to the effect that the whole had been managed through her absence, and probably by the aid of skeleton keys.

"I wish you to explain a few points to me, in presence of your master," I began, "and I need not tell you, Mysie, that a good deal depends on your answers being strictly truthful."

"I'm no in the habit o' tellin' lees," said Mysie, very tartly.

"So your master has informed me," I dryly rejoined. "You are aware, I suppose, that the things were taken away in a cab?"

"So I'm tellt," she coolly answered, and quite unabashed. "Did onybody ever hear o' aich daurin' impidence."

"You did not see the cab, did you?"

"No me; I was oot; hoo could I see it?" she answered, opening her eyes a little, but looking in no way disconcerted.

"For about an hour, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

The answer was by no means hearty or firm.

"What time did you go out?"

"Oh! whenever my forenoon's wark was dune," she returned evasively.

"Yes, but the hour?— the exact hour?" I impatiently pursued.

"I couldna tell to a minute," she at last answered with a dour and determined pursing of the lips.

"Then how can you be certain you were only out for an hour?" I sharply returned.

"It micht 'a' been langer," she admitted at length.

"When did you go out?" I cried, my patience fairly exhausted.

"About twelve o'clock," she slowly answered.

"Oh, indeed? And the cab took the things away about half-past one, and you returned after two? That's more than an hour you were absent."

"Yes, a wee thing mair."

"About three times more," I pointedly put it.  "Now, what were you doing all that time?"

Mysie reddened, and looked appealingly towards her master.

"I was getting my messages," she sulkily said at last.

"And it took you nearly three hours to do that? Do you remember all that took place during that time?"

"Oh, ay: fine."

"One of the messages was for whiskey, wasn't it?" I pleasantly pursued. "How long do you think it took you to get that message?"

No answer.

"Come away, Mysie," said her master sternly, "tell the detective how long it took you to get it and drink it."

It was impossible to extract an answer from her. She shuffled and evaded till I fairly lost patience.

"Weren't you drinking nearly the whole time? and didn't some one about one o'clock induce you to come to this house in a cab and open the door for them, and help them to remove two trunks full of your master's property?" I sternly continued, fixing her with my eyes, and feeling for my handcuffs.

"No they didna!" she shouted, with amazing energy. "I never was near the house till I cam' hame mysel' and let mysel' in the side door, and the key was never oot o' my pocket."

I stared at her pityingly. She seemed to believe her own words, and I concluded that she had been drunk indeed.

"You have a bad memory, I think, but fortunately we have witnesses who will be able to refresh it a little."

"What do the witnesses say?" she boldly and defiantly answered. "If they say that I let onybody in an' helped them awa' wi' the things, Gide forgie them for perjuring themsel's."

"Were you with anyone during that time who can substantiate what you say?"

The answer was long in coming, but it was to the effect that she had been with a friend—  a woman named Mrs. M'Andrew— who could testify that she had not been out of the public house at all till she left to go home. But she could not say where this woman lived, or give any particulars likely to lead to her discovery. Indeed, it seemed to me that this boon companion existed only in Mysie's imagination.

I dismissed Mysie at last in disgust, and revealed what I had discovered to her master. He was shocked and horrified, of course, and could only be satisfied of the truth by accompanying me to the next house, and getting the facts from the lady's own lips. Then he became as angry and furious as before he had been lenient and palliating, and I had no difficulty in inducing him to allow me to take Mysie away with me.

I got her easily to the Office by sending for a cab, and then inviting her to accompany me and repeat her statement before the Fiscal. She obeyed without suspicion, and repeated her statement very accurately, but then was struck dumb to discover that she was really a prisoner, and about to be led off to the cells. Her denunciations of me were anything but pleasant to listen to, and I rashly concluded, from her very energy and anger, that she was the guilty one neatly trapped.

Mysie had named the public house which she had honored with her presence and patronage that day, and to that shop I went as soon as I had seen her locked up. The publican was a sober, clear-headed man, and on questioning him I was a little staggered to find one important statement of Mysie confirmed. She had been in that public house for somewhere about two hours, and she had had a female companion whom she addressed as Mrs. M'Andrew. More, it was this companion who had paid for most of the drink consumed, a circumstance which Mysie had omitted to mention. They had met there on more than one occasion, and the publican was quite sure that he could identify the woman were she placed before him, but, like Mysie, he had no knowledge of her except by seeing her on these few occasions in his shop. His opinion of Mrs. M'Andrew's character was very tersely conveyed in a shrug of the shoulders, which I was left to interpret as I chose.

In spite of that look I was anxious to make Mrs. M'Andrew's acquaintances. Her evidence might not be worth much— for a guzzling companion will swear anything— but I felt sure that it would help me to a solution of the strange crime. Back I went to the Lock-up, and plied Mysie with every imaginable question about her companion. She admitted that she had only seen the woman three times; that the woman had been the first to speak; had introduced herself in a little drinking box to which Mysie was wont to retire when she visited the public-house, and had always sat close to her in the box on the pocket side of her dress. In that pocket Mysie kept the key of the side door of the house, a common-looking thing with very ordinary wards, but she was quite certain that the key had never been out of her possession on the day of the robbery all the time she had been in Mrs. M'Andrew's esteemed society, for she had put her hand in her pocket occasionally to make sure. The mysterious woman was little, and had black hair and eyes, and a sallow complexion. Mysie, I may state, was tall, angular, and very erect in her carriage.

The prisoner still protested most vigorously that she had not aided or abetted the thieves in any way, and that she had been as startled and horrified at the discovery as any one could be, all of which I heard as if I heard her not, I saw that I had got to the end of my tether with Mysie— he either could not or would not tell more— and as the most tempting offer would not induce her to reveal the names of her accomplices, I began to think that Mysie must suffer alone. There was still a chance of tracing the plunder, as that kind of stuff cannot be so easily concealed or got rid of; but, quite satisfied that I had the principal culprit under lock and key, I did not exert myself particularly in the matter, being at the time busy with another very much more important case. I had somewhat carelessly decided that it was a very clear and gross case of breach of trust, which was very far from the truth.

How, as the case stood, it is evident that the housekeeper would have been tried and convicted, and probably been treated to a year or two's imprisonment. But here came in one of those chance clues or odd circumstances which I alluded to in starting.

In going along the Bridge one day I met and passed a fellow who was generally known as "Dandy Jim." His real name, I believe, was James Dandie, but, as he was inclined to foppishness, and there had been a song entitled "Dandy Jim" popular about the time when he changed his trade, the name stuck to him.

Jim was a tailor by trade, and was always set to that occupation when in prison. He was a little fellow, bull-necked, very erect, and having the unmistakable "tailor's nick" in his back. Of course, he was vain and conceited— the majority of little men are.

As Jim passed me he dropped his eyes to the ground, for, though he worked occasionally, it was oftener at thieving than tailoring. He passed on, and then I stopped, thought for a moment, and turned and followed him. In that brief moment a queer thought had struck me. There was nothing fresh about Jim but his waistcoat, which was white. In the list of things missed from Mr  Cleghorns there was no mention of a white waistcoat, but I had noticed that the bookseller wore a white waistcoat, ornamented with pretty blue glass buttons. I turned back to see what kind of buttons were on Jim's waistcoat. After walking some two hundred yards I made up to him, and engaged him in some preliminary talk, eyeing the waistcoat all the while. It struck me that Jim was uneasy under the scrutiny, but affected not to observe the direction of my glance. I was disappointed; the buttons were of white mother-of-pearl, and I was strongly inclined to let him pass on. But his uneasiness and impatience to be gone gave me hope, and I detained him and said—

"That's a nice waistcoat you've got. Had it long?"

"'Oh, yes— years," he answered, which carried a lie in the face of it. The garment looked nearly new, and certainly not like one that had been washed and dressed for years.

"It looks wonderfully fresh yet," I continued, pleasantly. '"Did it cost you much?"

"I forget now— I didn't steal it," he awkwardly returned, looking confused.

"It doesn't seem to fit you very nicely about the neck," I observed, becoming more hopeful. "Widish, I think. A tailor ought to be ashamed to wear a bad fit."

"I meant to have taken it in a bit, but forgot," he returned helplessly; "but I'll have to fly. I'm in a hurry;" and he would have gone very fast, but I moved with him as far as the Tron, and then invited him to turn up the street with me instead of down. He obeyed without a single word, though his look was a painfully crestfallen one. He would not have looked so dejected if he had known how little I knew. At the Office he was accommodated with another waistcoat, while I took the white one over to Mr. Cleghorn. His first answer disappointed me.

"Have you missed a white waistcoat?" I asked.

"No."

"But you wear them," I said, pointing to the one he had on.

"Yes," and then he added that he had three of them, and that there might be one missing.

"Is that like it?" and I displayed Dandy Jim's.

The bookseller glanced at the buttons, and said decidedly, "No;" then he examined the waistcoat more closely, and hesitated, and finally said that it beat him to tell— it might be his and it might not, Mysie would be able to settle that point.

I did not expect much assistance from that quarter, and said so; but on showing Mysie the waistcoat she promptly said—

"Ah, it's Maister Cleghorn's, but the buttons have been changed at the washing."

I asked her to explain, when she pointed out the buttons were arranged to come off, being inserted through small holes, and fastened with split rings behind. She added that they should be of blue glass— Mr. Cleghorn wore no other kind. She was positive as to the identity of the waistcoat, but could point to no particular mark by which the identification was made, which seemed to me to weaken her evidence considerably.

Next morning Dandy Jim was brought up at the Police Court and remitted. He seemed to take very little interest in the proceedings, but while they were going on I chanced to notice  that the fingers of the accused were going  through certain motions, quite visible to some of the audience behind.

He was using the dumb alphabet. I was too late to follow all he had been telegraphing, but the last word I did manage to spell with him and that was B-u-t-t-o-n-s. I looked at the audience, but could recognize no one there as following his subtle motions.

Jim had no wife or fixed companion or I might have been more lucky. He was bundled out, and as his case was nearly the last, he was shortly after taken out into Parliament Square to the jail coach to be conveyed to the Calton Jail. Quite a crowd generally assembles to see the prisoners brought out, and police have to keep them back in a line with the High Street. As Jim was brought out a little sallow-faced woman in a shabby black shawl raised an arm and shouted to him—

"It's all right, Jim;" to which he replied by a grin and a wink.

I saw the whole, and, as soon as Jim was out of my hands into the coach, I moved along towards the crowed, as if to assist the police in keeping them back.

I thus got a good look at the woman without her once suspecting she had been noticed particularly. She had black eyes and hair, and in every particular answered the description of "Mrs. M'Andrew."

I could have taken her then, but decided to wait a little. The van drove off, the crowd dispersed, and the sallow woman went with them.

I allowed her a fair start, and then followed. She went to a public house first, and had half a gill of whiskey, to brace her up, I suppose, after the trial to her feelings. Then she went straight down to the street till she came to Hay's Close, which she entered.

I followed her up one of the dark stairs, gauging my speed by the sound of her footsteps till she went into a dark passage and entered one of the rooms.

I groped in after, intending to find the room, but I must have overshot the spot, for while I was groping, the door opened, and by the light I saw her move out again.

Her back was towards me, and the door was quickly closed after her, so she did not notice my presence, but moved down the stair lilting cheerily to herself the while. I followed as nimbly. She stopped at the first gutter sypher, or grating, leading to the common sewer, and there stooped and dropped something.

The movement was so unexpected by me that I could not get close to her in time to see what she had done. As she raised herself, however, my hand dropped on her shoulder, and I said—

"Well, Mrs. M'Andrew, what are you doing here?"

She became ghastly and speechless in a moment, so I took her to the mouth of the close, handed her over to the policeman on the beat to be taken to the Central, and then got the scavenger to bring his scoop and clear out the sypher.

Out of the first scoopful of mud we picked four pretty blue glass buttons and three split rings, and some more came up after.

I got another man and re-ascended to the house, in which we found a tall, insolent jade, and took her away to join the others. In the house there were one or two of the articles stolen from Mr. Cleghorn's house, but the bulk of the property had disappeared, and was never recovered.

Among other things taken was a black veil, so exactly like that worn by Mysie the housekeeper, that I made sure that it really was one of hers, till she assured me most positively that she had but one.

We were still as far as ever from a solution of the mystery, and might have remained so, even with evidence enough to convict the lot had the dark woman not tried to save herself by revealing the whole scheme.

The planning had been done by Jim. Mrs. M'Andrew's task was the delicate one of getting on drinking terms with Mysie, and picking her pocket of the door-key, of the wards of which she took a cast under her shawl in the box in the public-house.

An old key was bought and altered to fit the cast, and it was that which was used at the robbery. On the day of the robbery Mysie met her kind friend, Mrs. M'Andrew, who gave her several glasses of whisky, one of which was drugged with laudanum.

While the time was thus passing so quickly in the public house, the tall jade whom I had arrested last, dressed somewhat like the housekeeper, and wearing a black veil, boldly entered Mr. Cleghorn's house accompanied by Jim. They had the cab with them, and the cabman, all unconscious, assisted in the robbery.

They drove to a railway station, but, instead of leaving by one of the trains, put the boxes in the left luggage office— a nice hiding-place!— till they had arranged with a reset to buy the whole.

At the transferance Jim took a notion to the white waistcoat and some other articles, and insisted upon wearing it in spite of several warnings from his companions. These warnings, I suppose, had recurred to Jim when I made such pleasant inquiries about his waistcoat on meeting him on the South Bridge, and hence his confusion and anxiety to be gone.

So Mysie was proved to be innocent after all, while the other three went to prison for terms of varied length, the confession of the dark woman having availed her not one jot, as our case was quite strong without it.

The affair gave Mysie a great shock, and for some time her health was seriously affected, which circumstance caused her old master to take pity on her and restore her to her place. It was a salutary lesson to her, however, for, old though she was, she abjured drink ever after, and became as staunch and rabid a teetotaller as her master.

____________________

8:  The Berwick Burr

The first time my attention was directed to Will Smeaton was by a telegram from a Border town which described his appearance, and stated— a little late, however— that he had escaped in the direction of Edinburgh. The message called for Smeaton's arrest on suspicion of a very deliberate attempt at murder, the victim being a sweetheart named Jessie Aimers. The full particulars followed the telegram, and they seemed to leave little doubt of Smeaton's guilt.

Jessie Aimers was a girl of superior education, a teacher in the town, and greatly beloved by all. She and Smeaton had been brought up at the same school, but with very different results— for he had become a kind of coarse dare-devil, a brass-finisher by trade, with a strong inclination for salmon poaching; while Jessie grew up refined, modest, and gentle.

What possible bond of love could exist between two such natures? is the question which naturally rises to one's lips; yet, with that tantalizing contrariety which humanity seems to revel in, the answer was only that such love did exist, and in no common degree of strength.

The question was asked and echoed by all the townsfolk, and debated and wondered over, but the only decision was that Jessie Aimers was foolish to lavish her love on such a worthless object, and very much to be pitied on that account. Simple, short-sighted townsfolk! Jessie's love was her life, her breath, the very pulse of her heart. To give up that would have been simply to lie down in the grave.

The circumstances under which the attempt at murder was said to have been made were these: Jessie Aimers had left her home about dusk on a fine October evening to meet her lover, who was positively forbidden her father's house. They had met at some appointed spot, and were seen about an hour later wandering slowly up by the riverside. Smeaton appeared to be in a bad temper, for he was talking loudly and hotly.

Jessie was answering gently and pleadingly. It was then quite dark, but they were readily recognized by their voices. Further up the river, and but a short time after, a great scream was heard, and very soon Smeaton was seen returning along the path alone, in great haste, and so intent on his own thoughts that he passed an intimate acquaintance close enough to brush his sleeve, silent as a ghost.

Smeaton had gone straight home, but stayed there only long enough to get some money and his watch, and then made his way to the railway station and took a ticket for Edinburgh.

It was the manner in which this ticket was procured which first excited suspicion. Smeaton did not go to the ticket window himself, but skulked at the other end of the station, while he sent a boy whom he had hailed for the purpose to get the ticket.

The boy was known, and the ticket clerk— astonished at him taking such a long journey— refused to give the ticket till he admitted that he was acting not for himself but for Will Smeaton.

The boy probably made no mention of the circumstance to Smeaton, for when the ticket clerk went over the train helping to examine the tickets, and came upon Smeaton in an obscure corner, he said to him laughingly—

"Are ye feared to come for the ticket yoursel'?" whereat the passenger looked horribly scared and taken aback, so much so that he was unable to find voice to reply before the ticket clerk was gone.

While this had been taking place, some young fellows were making a queer catch on the river. They were salmon poachers, and were hurriedly making a cast of a net at a shady part of the stream after seeing the watchers safely out of sight, when suddenly one of them cried out—

"Pull in! pull in! we've gotten as bonnie a beast as ever was ta'en oot the water. I saw the white glisk o' her as she tried to skirt roond ootside the net, but we've gotten her! The sly witch is hidin' at the bottom, but ye'll see her in a meenit!"

Very much more quickly and rashly than paid salmon laborers the others rushed the ends of the close meshed net ashore, agreeing the while that if it was but a single fish, it was a sixty or seventy pounder at least, and in a moment or two had landed the bonnie white fish— sweet Jessie Aimers, with her light dress clinging close to her slight figure, her eyes closed as in death, and her white face gleaming up at them like a shining moon out of the dense gloom.

"Giude save us, it's a wuman! drooned! deid!" the scared poachers cried in a breath, and by a common impulse they were near dropping her and the net, and taking at once to their heels.

But one more sharp-sighted than the rest, bending down, noticed first that there was a wound on the white brow, which was bleeding, and next that the features were familiar to him.

"Dog on it, lads, if it's no bonnie Jessie Aimers!"

Exclamations of incredulity and horror ran round the group, and it was only on one striking a match and holding the light close to the cold face that they were convinced of the truth.

They stood there, silent and sorrowful, and with watchers and their own dangers far from their thoughts, and then one threw out a wonder as to how Jessie had got into the water.

"Fell in, maybe," suggested one.

"Or jumped in, mair likely," said another.

"The puir thing has been fretting her life away for Wull Smeaton. I aye thought it wad come to this. She was far owre gude for him."

Maybe he helped her in," darkly suggested a third. "I've seen them often walking here thegither, and he's a perfect brute when he's in a passion. He wad ding her in as sune as look at her."

This last suggestion found most acceptance. These men knew Smeaton thoroughly— his fiery temper, brutal strength, and impulsive ferocity— and had little doubt but his hand had sent the poor girl to her watery grave. Their only difficulty was how to act in the dilemma.

One thought that it would be safest, in order to avoid awkward questioning by those in authority, to quietly slip the body into the water again, stow away their net in its usual hiding-place, and drop work for the night; but this proposal was not well received, for Jessie was a general favorite, and was admired from a distance by the roughest in the place. While they stood thus in doubt one of them suddenly exclaimed—

"Deid folk dinna bleed! She's mybe living yet— let's gie the puir thing a chance—row her on the grass— lift up her airms—dae onything that's like to bring her roond."

The result of this electrifying speech was that the whole gang lent a hand in the rough and ready means of restoration, and, with such good ellect, that very shortly the supposed drowned girl gave signs of life, though not of consciousness.

Thus encouraged, the men made a litter of their coats, and ran with her to the nearest cottage, where she was put to bed, and tended and nursed as carefully as if she had been in her own home.

Jessie's parents were sent for and informed as gently as possible of the accident, and their first exclamation on reaching their daughter's side was— "Oh, the villain! this is Smeaton's wark."

Jessie was able to recognize her father, and smile faintly when he took her hand in his own, but she was too weak to give any account of the accident or crime till next morning.

By that time the flight of Smeaton had been discovered, and telegrams despatched ordering his arrest and detention; and when Jessie woke she found not only the lieutenant of police, but a Magistrate at her bedside ready to hear her statement and act upon her charge.

Then they all were surprised to And that Jessie had no charge to make. She would not, by as much as a look, admit that Smeaton had thrown her into the water, or even struck her so as to cause her to fall in or receive the wound on her temple. How had the accident happened then?

"I must have fallen in," said Jessie, after a long pause, and with tears in her eyes.

"Yes, you must have fallen in," impatiently interposed her father, who positively hated her lover, or you could never have been picked out; but was the falling in purely accidental? Surely, Jessie, I have trained you well enough in truthfulness to be able to rely on your answer in a matter of life and death?"

"Yes, father, dear," meekly answered Jessie, with fresh tears. "I will always be truthful. But I cannot answer every question. I would rather die and be at rest."

"If this wretch attempted to drown you— to take your life— do you think you are doing right to screen him from the just punishment of his crime?" sternly observed her father.

"Will would never attempt to do such a thing," warmly answered the girl. "He has faults— though not so many as people imagine— but that he would never do. It is not in his nature."

"The police are after him now, and likely to get him, and when he is tried you will be forced to speak the truth," said her father; "you will be the principal witness, and if you do not speak the whole truth you will be sent to prison yourself."

"I will never say anything against him though they cut me in pieces," said Jessie, with a deep sigh. "Why did they take me out of the river? It would have been better to let me lie than torture me with questions."

As Jessie's condition was still precarious it was decided to let the matter rest for a little, and meanwhile make every effort to capture Smeaton, trusting to Jessie becoming less reticent, or other evidence turning sufficient to secure his conviction.

On the same forenoon that Jessie was thus questioned I was going along a street near Nicholson street with my thoughts about as far from this case as the moon is from the sun.

As yet I had only the brief telegram to guide me, and that contained but a meager description of the man. He was said to be a native of Berwick; of medium height; and to have curly hair of a sandy hue, and a florid complexion, and to be rather muscular and firmly built. These points might suit a dozen out of every hundred one might meet in passing along the street, and the description interested me so little that the actual features had at the moment all but left my memory.

What invisible finger is it that guides many of our sudden impulses? When I entered that street I had no intention whatever of visiting a pawnbroker's, but when I came to one of their prominent signs I turned into the stair and ascended it, as gravely as if I had gone south for another purpose than to visit that particular establishment.

I had been there the day before looking for some trinkets which were reported stolen, and as I entered the thought struck me that I might ask for them again as an excuse for my reappearance.

I was in no hurry, however, and as I could hear that there were some customers in before me, I simply took my stand inside one of the little boxes, and nodded to the proprietor to intimate that I should wait my turn.

For the benefit of those lucky mortals who have never been forced to enter such a place, I may explain that these boxes ran along in front of the counter, and are chiefly useful for hiding one customer from another. Once shut in, you are screened from every eye but that sharp million-power magnifier owned by the proprietor or his assistant.

As soon as I was shut in I noticed that the box next to me was occupied by a male customer, who was busy extolling the value and powers of a silver lever which he was trying to pledge.

The pawnbroker was quite willing to take the watch, but, as is usual in such cases, the point on which they disagreed was the sum to be advanced on the pledge. The argument was not particularly interesting to me, and I gradually left it behind in my thoughts while I revelled in the queer brogue of the stranger.

It was a rich and musical twang to my ears, and when the man came to any word with the K in it— such as " tr-r-r-ain "— he rolled that R out into about a thousand, with a rich swell which made one imagine he enjoyed it.

I was puzzled for a moment or two to decide on the exact locality of the dialect— though I have often boasted that I can tell the dialects of Scotland and a good part of England to within thirty miles of the exact spot on simply bearing them spoken.

"The man is from Newcastle," I rather hastily decided: then came a slight mental demur at the decision. There were slight points of difference and many strong points of resemblance. I listened for a little longer, and then smiled out at my own slowness and stupidity.

''I might have known that tongue at the first sentence,'' was my mental exclamation. ''It's the Berwick burr."

While this analysis was going on in my mind the haggling over the watch was concluded by the stranger accepting a loan of thirty shillings on the pledge, and a ticket was rapidly filled lip to that effect till it came to the important question—

"What name?"

There was a pause before the answer came, and when it was spoken there was much in the careless tone which implied that too much reliance was not be placed on the truthfulness of the reply.

"Oh, say John Smith."

"I can't take it at all unless you give me your real name," said the pawnbroker, sharply. I have no doubt my presence put a little edge on him. "How am I to know," he virtuously added, "that the watch is not stolen?"

"Stolen?" echoed the stranger, warmly. "Man, there's the name of the man I bought it frae," and he turned out a watch-paper inserted under the back. I could net see the name, but I did make out the words " Berwick-on-Tweed."

"I'm no a thief— I'm a brass founder to trade," continued the man, with energy, "and I expect to lift it again in a week or two."

"A brass founder?" I thought, with a start. " I wonder if his name is Smeaton?"

While I was wondering the bargain was concluded, and the money paid over, and then the man left. I left my box at the same moment, and we moved out together.

"It's a nice morning," he said, and I returned the greeting.

When we reached the street he turned northwards, and I decided that that was my way too.

"I heard you say you are a brass founder," I remarked. "You'll be looking for a job ?"

No, he didn't think he was— he meant to lie quiet for a little.

"Oh, indeed?— got into trouble, I suppose," I returned, with interest. "Well, man," I abided, in a confidential whisper, "I know a place where your dearest friends couldn't get at you. You'd be safer there than anywhere. Care to go?"

He wasn't sure. He didn't mind going, but he did not promise to stay there. He was glad of company, however, and offered to treat me to some drink. I was in a hurry, and begged to be excused.

"You belong to Berwick?" I said decidedly.

He looked startled and troubled.

"Who said that ? How do you know ?" he stammered.

"I know the Berwick burr, and you've got it strong," I quietly answered.

"I haven't been in Berwick for mony a year," he said firmly.

"I thought that— that's what puzzled me for a while— you've got a touch of Coldstream or Kelso on your tongue," I coolly remarked.

He stared at me in evident consternation, and getting a trifle pale, but made no reply. I had been studying his appearance, and from that moment felt almost certain of my man.

I conducted him by North College Street, down College Wynd, chatting familiarly all the way, but never extracting from him his real name. I took him that way to convey to him the idea that he was going to some low "howlf," in which a man in trouble might burrow safely, and was pleased to note that, as the route became more disreputable, his spirits rose. He evidently did not know the city, and that circumstance aided me. I turned up the Fishmarket Close, and into the side entrance to the Central.

"What kind o'a place is this?" he asked, staggered at the width and spaciousness of the stair.

"It's the place I told you of," I carelessly answered, taking care to make him move up the stairs in front of me. I saw his step become more faltering and unsteady, and when we reached the door of the "reception room,"

I knew by his ghastly pallor that the truth had flashed upon him. "Straight in there, Smeaton," I said, as his eye fell on me. "This is an unexpected pleasure to both of us."

He looked at me like a trapped tiger, and I fully expected him to make a dash and dive for liberty.

"What's your name?" he almost groaned.

"M'Govan."

"The devil!" he ungratefully exclaimed, and then I led him in, and accommodated him with a seat. He became fearfully agitated, and at length blurted out—

"If anything has happened to the girl, I'm not to blame for it."

He did not once seem to think of denying his identity, and yet till that moment I was anything but certain that I had the right man. He seemed a desperate, callous and daring fellow, and but for the canny way in which he had been led to the place would, I felt sure, have given a world of trouble to capture.

But once fairly limed, he became but a quaking coward. I did not understand his terror till I learned that he did not know that Jessie Aimers had been rescued, and her life saved.

There was a visionary gallows before the villain at the moment seen only by himself. We were smiling all round, but there wasn't a ghost of a smile left in him.

After he had emitted a very brief declaration, he was locked up; and next day a man came through and took him back to the town he had left so suddenly.  Jessie Aimers still persisted in her silence, and the only charge which could justify Smeaton's detention was one of salmon poaching.

The evidence took some time to collect, and when the trial came on, Jessie Aimers was just able to drag herself out of bed and be present. Smeaton was found guilty, and fined heavily, with an alternative of imprisonment, which every one said would be his reward.

But to the astonishment of all, and the disgust of Jessie's father, the fine was paid.

No one but Smeaton then knew that the money had been furnished by Jessie Aimers; and yet, when the brute was set at liberty, and she waited at the Court entrance to see him and speak with him as he passed out, he was seen by many to push the loving girl violently from him and walk off with a servant girl of evil reputation named Dinah King.

Jessie pressed back the rising tears, and was able to draw on a faint smile before she was joined by her father.

Her father had almost to carry her home, and every one looking on that pale face and drooping form, declared that Jessie was not long for this world.

Some months after the trial, the house where Dinah King served was broken into and robbed. Although the plunder was mostly of a kind not easily hidden or carried away no trace of it was got, and the thieves were never heard of.

After a decent interval Dinah discovered that the work of that house was too heavy for her, and gave notice to leave. When she did go, she left the town, and Smeaton went with her.

Had she gone alone, perhaps no suspicion would have been aroused, but his reputation was already tainted, and the result was another intimation tons to look after the pair, as it was rumored that they had gone to Edinburgh.

The very day on which this message arrived, a young lady appeared at the Office asking for me, and giving her name as Miss Aimers. As she appeared weak and faint, she was allowed to await my arrival.

When I saw her face my first thought was— "How young and how sweet to have death written on her face!" Yes, death was written there— in the pale, sunken cheeks and waxy lips; in the deep, lustrous eyes, and in the gasping and panting for breath which necessitated every sentence uttered being broken in two.

A word or two introduced her, and then I distinctly recalled the former case with Smeaton, and a thrill of pity ran through me as I looked on that wistful face and eager pair of eyes and listened to her story.

''Everyone is prejudiced against him, but my whole heart is wrapped up in him," she said with strange calmness. " Look at me. I am dying. I know it, and yet I am calm and fearless. I could even be happy were it not for him, and the thought of him being lost to me through all eternity.

"I could not exist in Heaven sundered from him. It would not be Heaven to me. Oh, sir! you have seen much misery and much wickedness, but you know that a woman is not always blind even when she loves with all her soul. He is not so bad; but he is easily influenced and led away. If he is taken and put in prison, through that fearful woman, will you remember that? And if I should not be allowed to see him, or if I am taken away before then, will you give him a message from me?"

I bowed, for I could not speak.

"Tell him I have never lost faith in the goodness of his heart; that I shall love him forever, and that Heaven will never be Heaven to me without him beside me. Will you tell him to think of that— sometimes— when he is alone; and of the sweet happy hours we spent together when we were but boy and girl, full of innocent glee and love, before he was contaminated and led away? Oh, if God would only grant me a little time longer on earth— a little time— just enough to see poor Will led back to the right road and safe for Heaven, I could lay my head down and say— 'Take me. Lord Jesus, take me home.' "

"You may be quite sure that time will he granted you for all that God needs you to do on earth," I softly returned. "He will not take you till your work is done."

I spoke with her for some time, going over many points in her history already partly known to me, but I found that she would not breathe one word against the man.

She would not admit that in a fit of passion he had thrown her into the river, or that she owed to that immersion her present feeble condition; she would not listen with patience to one slighting expression or word of demur; her whole soul was wrapped up in him, and no tender, pure-soiled mother could have yearned over her child more eagerly than she did over the man whose very name I could scarcely utter with patience.

When she was gone I drew a long breath, and mentally wished that I might get my clutches on Smeaton firmly enough to treat, him to a good long sentence of penal servitude.

I felt as if that would relieve my mind a bit.

A day or two later I came on Dinah and her companion, and took them without trouble, but they had not an article about them which could connect them with the robbery at Dinah's last place. After a short detention they were released, and I hoped that they would take fright and leave the city.

During my short acquaintance with Dinah it struck me that she was a great deal worse than her companion. "She is of the stuff that jail birds are made of, and a bad one at that," was my reflection, and I remember thinking that it would certainly not be long before I heard of her again, supposing they favored the city much longer with their presence.

I saw them occasionally after that, and noted the general decay in their appearance, and guessed at their means of living, but never managed to get near them. One evening I was surprised by a visit from Dinah at the Central. She looked savage and sullen— a perfect fiend.

''You want to take Will Smeaton?" she abruptly began. "I know you do, for you've been after him often enough."

''I would rather take you," was my cold reply, and I spoke the truth.

She affected to take the remark as a joke, and laughed savagely— having the merriment all to herself. Then she revealed her message. Smeaton and another were to break into a shop in the New Town by getting through a hatch, creeping along the roof, and thence descending through an unoccupied flat, and so reaching the workrooms and shop,

''You've quarreled with him, and this is your revenge, I suppose?" was my remark when she had finished: but Dinah's reply cannot be written down.

My only regret at the moment was that I could not warn Smeaton of his danger. Dinah went back and had dinner and supper with the man she had betrayed— actually broke bread with him and smiled in his face, and appeared more loving than she had showed herself for weeks.

A woman when good can be holier, purer, and more strong in her devotion and love than a man; but, when she is bad, the depths of iniquity which she can reach have never been touched by mortal man.

I sent over a posse of men one by one to the marked establishment, and when Smeaton and his companion appeared and ascended the stairs I followed, and so closed up the retreat.

They were not long gone. We heard the alarm, and some shouting and struggling, and soon saw Smeaton come scrambling out at the window on the roof by which he had entered, and come flying along the slates towards the hatch.

As he got close my head popped out in front of him, and he started— staggered back with an oath— lost his footing, and vanished over the edge of the roof. He was picked up on the pavement below, very much injured and quite senseless, and borne on a shutter to the Infirmary, while his captured companion was marched over to the Office and locked up.

Dinah, in ferocious joy over Smeaton's accident, got drunk and abusive, and was taken to the cells next day. Smeaton remained for the most part unconscious during two days and nights.

Towards the close of the second day a cab drove up to the Infirmary gate, and out of it stepped a young girl, so pale and feeble that every one thought it was a patient instead of a visitor who had arrived.

It was Jessie Aimers, who had risen from bed and taken that long journey the moment she heard of the accident. She was helped into the ward, and sat therewith Smeaton's hand in her own till evening, when he opened his eyes for a moment and hazily recognized her.

"Oh, Jessie, I'll never rise off this bed," he feebly exclaimed; and then, as her warm tears rained down on his cheeks, and her lips were pressed to his own, he said: "Dinna! dinna dae that! I dinna deserve it. Pray for me, Jessie, lass; it's a' I can ask o' ye now."

A screen had been put up round the bed, shutting them off from the gaze of the other patients; and inside of that the nurses glanced occasionally. They remained there, whispering and communing till Smeaton relapsed again.

Towards morning there was a cry, loud and piercing, behind the screen, but the night nurse was out of the ward at the moment. When she appeared one of the patients spoke of the cry, and the nurse looked in on the pair.

Jessie lay across the bed with her arms clasped tight about the patient, and her face hid in his bosom. Smeaton's face was marble-like, his eyes half open and fixed. The nurse knew that look at a glance, and called to her companion that Smeaton was dead, and she feared the young girl had fainted.

Gently they tried to disengage the clasping fingers that they might raise her and restore her to consciousness, but the deathly coldness of the thin hand caused them to start back and exchange a look of inquiry and alarm. They bent over her, they listened, all was still— still as the grave, still as eternity. Jessie was dead.

__________________

9: The Torn Tartan Shawl.

A SERVANT in a house at the outskirts of the city had been tempted by the clear air and dry frost to leave a whole "washing" of things out over night. She wanted them to get a nip of the frost, she said, but instead they got a nip of another kind.

The girl woke at four o'clock in the morning and happened to look out at the green, when the clothes were there all right. She rose again at six, and, looking out, had to rub her eyes to make sure that she was not still in bed and dreaming. Nearly the whole of the things were gone.

Satisfied that she was awake, she first asked herself if some kind brownie had taken the brunt of the morning's work off her hands by taking down and folding up the things; but then, remembering that these useful fairies had all vanished before the steam engine and electric telegraph, she ran out of the house, fearing theft and hopeful of catching some of the thieves. No one was visible.

The very best of the clothes were gone; the clothes pegs, all scattered over the ground, the empty ropes, and a few articles of trifling value alone being left to tell of the robbery. At least so the girl thought as she ran into the house and roused all within it with the news.

Of course the servant got the blame, and received notice of dismissal at once, although, as she afterwards informed me, it had been by her mistress's express orders that the things had been left out.

The lady denied that— it is convenient at times to have a bad memory— and so the disgrace rested on the girl's shoulders. Had the lady, instead of indulging in recrimination and wrangling, sent word promptly to us, the whole case might have assumed a very different aspect, as we could thus have sent word to most of the pawnbrokers by their hour of opening.

A good haul had been made, including some gentlemen's shirts of fine linen; the best of the lady's underclothing, and some twenty or thirty pairs of worsted stockings, of all sizes and sorts, as there was a big family.

The most of the linen was marked with the letters ''A. M. B.," and some of the stockings had the same initials worked into them with pink worsted near the top of the leg.

When the news reached us I went out to see the place and get a list of the stolen articles. Six valuable hours had been lost, and I frankly told the lady that she need scarcely hope to recover all she had lost, and all through that stupid delay.

The green had been left exactly as the servant had found it when she had rushed out in the morning— the clothes pegs littered the ground; and while I glanced over the approaches to the green, the girl began to pick up these pegs and put them into a cotton bag which hung about half way up one of the clothes poles.

This bag was suspended from a nail at a height convenient for the hand, and at the head of the nail there fluttered a little pennon, which had never been meant for that queer flag-staff. It was a shred of bright-colored tartan, which appeared to have been rent out of some one's shawl, as the owner hurriedly switched past.

"You've been damaging your shawl, Maggie," I remarked to the servant girl, who was busy laying off to me her wrongs and grievances, and the deplorable failings of mistresses in general.

"It's no mine— I dinna wear shawls," said Maggie shortly, as she continued her task. Her head was full of her troubles— mine was far away from what she was most anxious to speak of.

I took down the shred of tartan. It began narrow at the nail-head which had caught it, and got gradually broader, till it ended, like a filled-up A, in a fringe of the same colors. I spread the piece out along my palm, and then called to Maggie.

"Look here, now, and tell me if any one about the house, or living near, wears a shawl of that pattern?"

Maggie looked at the scrap of tartan, and declared most emphatically that no one in the household did wear such a shawl, and added with a smile that none of her acquaintances would be seen in such a thing— the colors being about the brightest and loudest that could be made for money.

The same thought had already struck me, and my thoughts instinctively wandered in the direction of some of my own bairns. The tartan was of just such a pattern as one may see on scores of shoulders about the Cowgate on a Sunday afternoon.

I seemed to see the whole shawl in that shred— a little square thing, folded across, and just big enough to cover the shoulders.

By mentally picturing the shawl on a woman's shoulders, and gauging her height by that treacherous nail, I could judge her to be a person rather under than above medium height, and immediately began to ask myself which of my "bairns" given to "snow-dropping," had been lately displaying such a grand shawl.

Useless! their name was legion. They nearly all delight in these things, and a dozen at least might wear tartan of the identical color of the shred in my hand. I began to think that I should make little of my discovery.

However, I placed the scrap of tartan carefully between the leaves of my pocket-book, completed my list so far as I could at the house, and left. A bundle of the things stolen was in the office before me.

They had been offered at a pawnbroker's shortly after the opening hour, and pledged for fourteen shillings. The boy who had taken in the things and paid over the money was a block-head.

He knew that the pledger was a woman, but could not describe her appearance. He did not think she was very old, and he did not think she was very young. Did she wear a tartan shawl? Yes, he thought so; and then he changed his mind, and thought that she hadn't any shawl.

No one could make anything of such a fool, and I strongly recommended the pawnbroker, for his own safety, to get rid of such a stupid assistant, to which the man replied that he would have been happy to do so had the lad not been his own son.

I grinned over my mistake, the pawnbroker helping me liberally, and then left. I then took a long stroll through the likeliest quarters, with a keen eye to every tartan shawl. Twice in the course of that walk did I start joyfully at sight of a shoulder shawl of the identical pattern, but in both cases the owners were decent hard-working folks, and not a trace of a rent or patch to be found in either of the articles.

With my eyes thus grown familiar in the search, I was wearily trudging homewards late in the afternoon with the shawl nearly gone from my thoughts, when on the South Bridge, near the head of Infirmary street, I came up to a wretchedly-clad woman, bearing in her arms a child, round which was wrapped a gaudy and apparently new shawl of the exact pattern I sought.

Now, at the first glimpse of this shawl, I decided that it was not the one I sought, which I imagined would scarcely be so bright and fresh-looking, but it was the incongruity of that bright shawl, allied to such rags and poverty, which made me slacken my pace, and almost instinctively follow the owner of the child.

The woman was not a professional thief— a glance at her somewhat pinched features told me that— yet her poverty was so apparent that I felt by no means certain that she would not have committed a robbery under such circumstances.

Poverty and a hungry bairn; where is the mother who could resist the pleadings of these? Then the shawl was the only fresh thing about the queer pair.

The mother's clothes were meager and shabby in the extreme; her boots were mere apologies for foot-coverings, and her bonnet only fit for a scarecrow, and the clothing of the child equally as poor.

They had also a worn and travel-stained look, and stood out prominently among the ordinary passengers as dusty tramps always do when they enter a city.

They were strangers, they were poor, and the child wore a tartan shawl of the exact pattern I sought; it could do no harm to follow them, with a sigh for the dinner I hoped soon to be consuming.

My interesting pair turned down Infirmary street, and stopped at the gate of that institution, became, indeed, part of a crowd already gathering there; visitors waiting the hour of admittance to see friends.

Five o'clock was the hour, and it lacked nearly ten minutes of that time.

Most of these visitors were of the poorest, land they varied the monotony of the waiting by exchanging experiences and expressions of sympathy.

My tramp Joined in the conversation, and I soon learned from her tongue that she came from the west. The Glasgow brogue was strong in her tongue, but not strong enough, and I soon heard her say that she had come from Airdrie, which accounted for the slight difference in the accent.

She was the wife of a pit laborer— an occupation considered far beneath that of a collier, who ranks as a skilled workman; and her husband in working among the hutches had got hurt in some way, and had been laid up at home till their house was almost stripped of furniture.

Then the disabled man had gone to Glasgow for advice, and, afterwards hearing of the great skill of the Edinburgh professors, he had scraped together enough to bring him through to this Infirmary, into which he was admitted as an indoor patient. He did not write very hopefully of recovery, and at length the wife, reduced to her last penny, had resolved to come through and see him with her own eyes.

"I'm feared that he's waur than he says, and maybe winna get better," she said, shedding tears freely as she spoke. "I've walkit every fit o' the road, thinking I saw a coffin at the end o' the way."

Cheering words and homely sympathy were showered upon her without stint, most of those present seeming to find their own troubles light besides what that slight woman had endured.

"Is that your only bairn?" one asked, to which the mother replied—

"Yes, and I thocht we wad baith a' been frozen to death on the road. It was awfu' caul' last nicht; I never thocht we'd see mornmg."

''What! did you sleep in the open air?" cried an old woman, holding up her hands.

"I hadna a penny to pay a lodging; and I was tired an dune, and didna like to gang to a poorhouse," was the choking answer.

The old Irishwoman wiped her own eyes, and then I saw her slowly fumble in her own pocket and produce twopence, which she tried to slip into the hand of the baby.

"Oh, no, no! Ho, thank ye," cried the mother in strong protest, and flushing painfully at the proffered help so thinly disguised. "I'm no needing that now. I've got money since then. There's some kind folk in the world yet, and I've as muckle as take me to my mither's after I see how my man is."

I did not hear the rest of her speech, for in putting back the proffered coppers she had thrown up the corner of the tartan shawl— turned it back with a whisk right under my eyes, and there I saw a wedge-shaped rent, as if a piece had been neatly torn out of the pattern near the edge. I was in a manner fascinated and horrified by the discovery, and stood staring at the torn shawl in a fashion that must have looked idiotic in the extreme.

"That's a bonnie shawl you've got on your bairn," I at length managed to say, by way of opening up a conversation.

''The bairn's bonnier than the shawl," one woman hastened to add, but that's aye a man's way o' looking at things. The brightest colors catch his e'e first."

"Have you had it long?" I continued to the mother.

"He'll be eleven months next week," she answered with a look of pride.

"I don't mean the bairn— the shawl," I said in correction.

"Oh, no, not long," she answered frankly, and then she appeared to catch herself up, and said no more.

"You've torn it a little there," I continued. "The bit seems to be taken clean out."

"Yes, I noticed that," she quietly answered. She did not seem to like me or my remarks— just when she was becoming so interesting to me too!

"Would you mind turning back the corner of the shawl again for a moment— just to oblige me?" I continued, in no ways abashed by her coldness.

She gave me a look as if wondering at my impudence, and then threw back the corner of the shawl over the baby's shoulder as I had desired. Her lock of contempt was beginning to be reflected in the faces around her, but I heeded the looks no more than if they had been the glassy stares of so many wax figures. I quietly took out my pocket book, turned open the leaves, and produced the shred of tartan.

Then I spread the torn part of the shawl flat on the baby's shoulder, placed the wedged-shaped piece I had taken from my pocket-book in the opening, and found that in shape, color, and size they fitted and corresponded exactly.

The woman followed my movements with no great interest. Her indifference might have been assumed or caused by the door being about to be opened.

"Where were you this morning between four and six o'clock?" I demanded, when I had satisfied myself that I had at last got the right shawl.

"That's nothing to you?" she indignantly answered, with a slight flash of annoyance.

"It is everything; and, if you won't answer it here, you must go with me up to the Police Office and refresh your memory there."

The woman turned right round and looked me full in the face, more in astonishment than alarm. Then some one whispered to her—

"It's M'Govan, the detective," with a significant nudge on the arm, and in a moment she became terribly agitated.

"Do you think I stole it?" she chokingly exclaimed.

"No, not exactly."

"Then what for do you want me to gang to the Office?"

"That is not for me to explain, but go you must."

"I winna! I've trampit a' this way to see my puir man, and I maun see him."

I brought out my handcuffs, whereupon the assembled crowd began to groan and hoot and abuse me to their heart's content. Would I drag a poor creature like that away to jail at such a moment, before she could even see her invalid husband?

I replied that I would not drag her if she was inclined to walk. Then names were showered upon me enough to have stocked a slang dictionary. I pointed out to the crowd that the door was now open, and that through it was their way, while ours was in quite a different direction; and at length, with the aid of a policeman who chanced to pass the head of the street, I convinced them that I was right. The woman was now crying bitterly, and the child was screaming in concert.

"What am I ta'en awa' for? Am I charged as a thief?" she at length sobbed as I led her off.

"Not yet. Just keep your mind easy for a little. It's only your baby's shawl as yet that is in trouble. Why are you afraid to say where you got it, and when?"

She could not see that any one had a right to ask that. She had not stolen it, nor had she bought it, but she declined to say more, till saw how serious things looked at the Office.

She was carefully searched, with the result that in her pocket was found a half sovereign and some coppers, but none of the stolen articles. Her baby was then inspected, and on it were found a pair of worsted stockings a world to big for its little legs, with the fatal initials "A.M.B." worked in pink worsted near the top of the leg.

The case now seemed very near clear, if a little sad. The woman had been in great want; had been tramping past the place, and under a sudden temptation had taken the clothes and pawned some of them.

I fully expected her to admit the robbery, and plead the circumstances in piteous tones in extenuation, but nothing of the kind. She roused out of her torpor of grief, and in the most indignant tones made a statement which seem to us to have not even the merit of ingenuity.

She had been sleeping in the open air on the outskirts of the city, with her child closely clasped in her arms, "to keep it frae the caul'," as it was but thinly clad, when she was roused by a hand shaking her violently.

The disturber of her half-frozen torpor was a woman dressed like a servant girl in a common print wrapper, and carrying a big bundle. The strange woman shook her till certain that she was awake, and then rebuked her strongly for exposing herself and her child when shelter was within her reach.

"I tellt her I was a stranger, and didna ken where the Night Asylum was, and that I hadna a penny in the world," continued our prisoner. "Then she took my bairn in her arms, and kissed it and cuddled it to make it warm, and then took the shawl off her shouthers— that shawl that you're makin' sic a wark aboot— and wrapped it roon' my wean, an' brocht a pair o' stockin's oot o' her bundle for it, an' tellt me to keep them. Then she gie'd me a shillin' an' tellt me to gang to a lodging in the Grrassmarket, and then said she was in a hurry or she wad have ta'en me there hersel', and gaed awa'."

And the half-sovereign found in her possession? How did she account for that? How did it happen that when the mysterious woman with the bundle spoke to her she had not a penny, and now she had a half-sovereign?

"Oh, a gentleman gied me that," she answered, quite promptly. "I was sittin' restin' on a step, when I got in the toon a bit— for I didna think it worth while to gang to the lodging as it was after six o'clock— when a gentleman cam' up to me and asked hoo far I had come, and aboot my man and my wean, and then he put his hand in his pooch, and brought oot a half-sovereign and put in my hands. I thought it was a sixpence, for it was dark at the time, and maybe he thocht that too. He looked a wee touched wi' drink— drunk, ye ken—and I was gled when he gaed awa'."

Clumsy, clumsy! a clumsy story in the extreme. We tried to convince her of that, and by cross-examining her to trip her up, but she stuck to her statements with amazing firmness, and even volunteered fresh details in confirmation.

Finding her obdurate, we gave her up in despair, and she was taken away and locked up in a state of frenzy which looked wonderfully real, and therefore piteous enough.

The only wonder to us now was where the rest of the stolen clothes had been hidden. Allowing for the woman spending some money in the forenoon, she might be reasonably expected to have about ten shillings left of the fourteen given by the pawnbroker, but that disposal accounted for only a part of the stolen things.

Could she have had any assistant who would share the plunder? I was anxious to settle that question. I brought in the pawnbroker's to see her, and he identified her in a haphazard fashion as the woman who pawned the thing, but then, as I have recorded, he was a blockhead, and his evidence had no great value.

I then thought of visiting the Infirmary to see if she had a husband there, and learn if the name she had given— Ellen Hunter— was real or assumed.

A little to my surprise I found the husband there, Archibald Hunter by name, as the card at the head of his bed testified; and the moment that a hint of the truth was given him he was so terribly excited and agitated that he would almost have been out of the place there and then had he been allowed.

"Hoo can blame a starving woman, with a wean at her breast?" was his wild inquiry. "Can ye no show mercy where it's no a real thief, but ane forced to it?"

''I daresay she would be shown mercy if she would admit the truth, and declare that she was driven to the act," I replied, "but that she refuses to do. She persists in trying to screen herself and put all the crime upon some imaginary persons who gave her the things. There's nothing new in that story; every thief has it at his tongue's end."

Though we thus disbelieved Ellen Hunter's story, we made every search for the rest of the plunder, and actually did come upon traces of it.

Several articles were recovered, which had been either sold or pawned, in which the linen mark had been removed bodily with a pair of scissors. This was particularly noticeable on the gentlemen's shirts, which had been marked on a little tab at the bottom of the breast.

In the case of one recovered, this tab had been cut off and the remaining end neatly stitched down. The consequences was that, though morally certain as to the identity of the shirt, the owner could not swear to it, and it was given back to the buyer, who declared that it had been bought from a man, whose appearance he described and whom he declared himself able to identify.

Meantime the trial of Ellen Hunter came on at the Sheriff Court, to which she had been remitted. No reasoning or persuasion could induce her to plead guilty, or advance extenuating circumstances by way of lightening her sentence.

"They may do what they like to me, but I winna say I'm guilty when I'm innocent," was her firm declaration. ''If my wean could only speak it wad tell ye that I've spoken naething but the truth."

The case accordingly went to proof, and was speedily settled to the satisfaction of the jury, who, without leaving the box, found the charge proven.

But then there arose in the court, close to the bar, a pale shadow of a man, who in broken tones stated that he was the husband of the accused, and pleaded for permission to say a few words in mitigation of his wife's offence.

The permission was granted, and, in a husky and broken tone, Hunter proceeded to narrate the circumstances which had brought him to the Infirmary— his wife's devotion, integrity and sterling honesty; and the dread fear which had brought her on that long journey on foot, and in the dead of winter, with a child at her breast.

The speech was given in the homeliest of language, and without any attempt at grammatical correctness; but there was a power and native eloquence about it which went to every heart.

The wife was sobbing loudly at the bar with her infant in her arms, and the judge, visibly affected along with the whole court, was about to pass a light sentence, when there came an interruption, the very last that any would have looked for in that place.

"I will do it, and I don't care for you!" was shouted out in a woman's voice in the audience, and as all looked around a girl known to me as "Sally the Snowdropper," struggled up from one of the seats in spite of the efforts of a man at her side to detain her.

Then there was a brief struggle and altercation, and the man, rising with her, dealt the poor girl a terrific blow in the eyes.

The whole court was aghast, and the brute was speedily collared and brought forward in custody.

Then the prisoner at the bar started up with a joyful scream, and, pointing to Sally, cried out—

"That's the woman! that's the kind lassie that gied me the shilling and wrappit her shawl roon' my wean. Ask her and she'll tell ye."

Sally came forward, staunching the blood flowing from her nose, and looking pale with excitement, but firm and self-reliant withal.

"The woman is innocent as the child in her arms," said Sally, as soon as she could speak. "A month or two in quod is nothing to me, but it's hard to send an honest man's wife there for nothing. I can't stand that. I never thought it would come to this, or I would have spoken out sooner. I stole the things— every one of them— and I met her and gave her the shawl I had on, as her child was nearly dead with cold. I never knew the shawl was torn, or likely to be traced, or I'd never have given it. I gave her the stockings too— the first pair that came to hand in the bundle, and put them on her bairn with my own hands. The mother was half-frozen in her sleep, and at first I thought they were both dead. Just let her go, and shove me in her place, and the thing will be squared."

"She's mad!— she's drunk, and doesn't know what she's saying," shouted the man who had assaulted her; but he was promptly removed and locked up, the immediate result of which was that he was discovered to be wearing a gentleman's white shirt resembling one of those stolen, and having the tab cut away from the breast, and stitched down like the one already described.

Sally very speedily proved that she was neither mad nor drunk by revealing where all the stolen things had been disposed of, and stating that the tabs of the white shirt had been doctored by her own hands. Her companion was next day identified as the man who had sold one of the shirts, and the case was complete.

Ellen Hunter, half frenzied with delight, was set at liberty and taken into her husband's arms; and when our case was complete Sally, instead of appearing as prisoner, was taken as a witness, and so moved every one that the Sheriff, before allowing her to be dismissed, thought fit to address to her a few words of strong commendation for her generous spirit and truly noble nature, at the same time advising her, in a kind and feeling manner, to try to get out of the debasing life for which she was so ill suited.

In vain! he might have saved his breath. Sally was too far gone to mend her ways, and, while her companion went to prison, she went drifting on to the death and destruction which speedily became her lot. But she left one green spot on her memory. How many such can each of us boast?

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10: A White Savage

THE WOMAN had a queer and almost crazed look; was miserably clad, with no bonnet on her head, and her hair covered with the "fluff" which flies about all factories and covers the workers. I am not sure if she had any covering on her feet; if she had, it must have been some soft material which gave out no more noise than her bare soles would have done.

Then, added to this, she smelled strongly of whiskey, though she was not in any way intoxicated. She had come into the Office at the breakfast hour and waited patiently till I appeared, without enlightening any one as to her business.

"No one but Mr. M'Govan was of any use to her," she said, and when I appeared and heard her begin her strange story I soon thought that I should be of no use to her either.

Her statements were so wild and improbable, and her delivery so incoherent, that I speedily decided that if I was not conversing with a mad woman, I was at least beside one suffering from delirium tremens.

Her age seemed to be about twenty-five, and she was by no means bad looking had she not been such a miserable wreck.

"I want you to help me to hunt for my man," she said with perfect self-possession.

"My name is Janet Hanford, and I'm married— maybe you'll mind the name."

I thought for a little— or appeared to do so— and then told her that she had the advantage of me, for I did not remember the name.

"Your husband has run away from you, then?" I remarked, secretly not at all surprised at his action.

"No, not that," she answered, and then it was that I began to doubt her sanity. "It was not running away. They told me he was dead and buried, and I believed them, but I saw him to-day riding along in a carriage with a grand lady— a new wife, as I suppose— and I want you to hunt him out. I'm not as good as I should be, but I'm still his wife surely.''

"Surely," I echoed, thinking it best to humor the maniac.

"You must know that though I've been in jail. I'm not a bad woman,'' she continued. "If I had been, he'd have divorced me, or at least put me away, for he was too poor to afford lawyer's fees. He's only a factory worker like myself.''

"How can that be, when you told me just now that you saw him riding in a carriage with a grand lady!" I asked, thinking to catch her up.

"That's the mystery which I can't understand," she answered. "You are to find out all about that. I did not see the lady's face right, as the carriage went by so fast, and I was horrified at seeing him, and could scarcely take my eyes of him, but I know it was Dick Hanford, my husband."

"Some one resembling him in features, no doubt," I thought. "What were you put in jail for, pray?" I added aloud.

"I was put in once or twice for drink," she said, hanging her head a little, "He wouldn't pay the fines, and so I had to suffer. It's my only failing. I was brought up as a girl behind the bar, and I got to take drink secretly till I couldn't keep from it. Then I was put away and went into the factory. It's down in Leith Walk. I used to be called the beauty of the mill, and all the men were daft about me."

"Good heavens!" was my mental exclamation, "daft about a creature like this!"

"I could have had my choice of a dozen men, but I took Hanford, though his wages was the poorest in the place," she calmly continued, "I suppose it was because I was daft about him. I'm that yet. I never loved any body else, and never can. "

"You said 'once or twice for drink'— were you ever in jail for anything else?" I asked, pretty sure that she had kept something back.

"Yes, I was in for two years. It's only about nine months since I got out. It was then they told me he was dead, and I believed them."

"What were you put in for?"

She trembled and grew paler, and tears came into her eyes.

"I don't remember much about it," she hurriedly answered; "perhaps you will. It was after one of my drinking fits. I was always excitable after them; and they say I sharpened a knife and lay in wait for him for a whole day and night, saying I meant to kill him. I couldn't have meant that, for I love him dearer than my own life. But when he came he was stabbed, and taken to the Infirmary. They said I did it, and I suppose it's true. I don't remember doing it. He was very badly hurt, and they thought he would die. That's why I was so long in prison before they tried me. If he had died I should have wished to be hanged, so as to be done with everything. You look frightened. Does it seem horrible for me to say these things, when they are true!"

"They do not sound nice from a woman's lips," I gravely replied. "I remember your case now. You hid in the loft of the factory for two days, after stabbing him, and it was I who had the hunting for you. I thought it a very bad case at the time, and I remember your husband in Court giving a picture of your domestic life which would have melted a heart of stone. I suppose my plain speaking horrifies you quite as much as yours does me?"

"No; everybody speaks that way, so I suppose I must bear it, though I don't feel so bad as people think me," she answered, with a despairing ring in her tones. "If I hadn't been brought up in a public house, and so learned to drink, I might have been in a very different position. Everybody is against me, and sometimes I feel as if I was against myself."

"There was a child, too, I think," I continued. "Didn't you injure it in some way, or ill-treat it? I forget the particulars now."

"It's leg was broken," she answered, with a quiver in her voice, and tears again filling her lustrous eyes. "I think the doctor said he would never walk right, if he lived, because it, was the thigh that was broken. It was hurt, about the head, too. Perhaps it fell down the stairs and hurt itself. Some of them believed that I filing it down. I don't think I could have done that, though I was at the top of the stair when they picked him up. I don't remember anything about it."

"And what has become of the child?" I asked in a low tone, not sure whether to feel overwhelmed with horror or pity.

"They told me he was dead too when I came out, but perhaps they've told a lie about that too. Perhaps he's living, and only hidden from me as Hanford has been. That's more work for you. I have no money, and I must have justice. If he is alive he is bound to support me, and if he has married that grand lady, he must go to prison for bigamy."

Broken and lost though she was, she seemed I to know the law pretty well, but I thought there was little chance of it coming to an appeal of that kind.

"Who told you that your husband was dead?" I asked.

"His mother. That was when I came out of prison. I went home, of course, but I found the house let to strangers, and was told that it had been so for two years. Then I went to his mother's, and she would scarcely let me in, or speak to me. She has an awful hatred to me. At last she let me in and told me he was dead."

"And you believed it without further inquiry?"

"No, I didn't believe it at all at first; but then she got out a certificate from the registrar and showed it to me. I read his name on it with my own eyes, Richard Hanford. If he isn't dead, that name must have been forged. You'll maybe have to take her for that. I shouldn't be sorry at that, for she has caused me many an unhappy hour."

Here was a case altogether uncommon. It is usual for the injured persons, not the injurers, to seek our aid.

"You would like your husband to be put in prison, too, if he is alive, and yet you fancy you love him?" I remarked. "That's a queer kind of love which seeks a revengeful retaliation like that. I've seen women sunk in degradation of the deepest kind who would make the blush rise to your cheek—"

The crimson rose to her face under the taunt there and then.

"I don't wish him any ill, but I am his wife, and he has deserted me, and thrown me off, and I want you to find him. I want to try to do better, and lead a different life. I want to deserve that he should love me; and I will not allow him to have the love of another while I am his wife."

"I am afraid you have made some strange mistake," I hastened to observe. "Your husband is probably dead, and beyond the reach of your love or your neglect. The gentleman you saw in a carriage possibly resembled him strongly— such cases often come under our notice. Mistaken identity? why, it's as common as day. We had a woman here the other day who insisted upon us arresting a man whom she alleged washer husband, and she would not be convinced till he brought his father and mother and a whole host of relatives to prove that he was another man altogether, and had never been married in his life. And even supposing your husband were alive, how could you prevent him loving another? To retain a man's love is even more difficult than to win it, and can never be done by running a knife into him, or throwing dishes at his head."

"I did not do that, it was the drink did it," she tearfully pleaded. " He said I would never be better till the grave closed over me. You heard him say so at the trial. But I think there's a chance for me yet. It's a dreadful struggle to keep away from drink, but I win the battle sometimes. Ho one knows what I have fought against, and I'm so poor, and despised, and wretched now that nobody cares to ask. If I were a black savage in a far off country they'd send missionaries to me, and give me every comfortable help; but I'm only a white savage living in Scotland; and I tell you I'm not mistaken about seeing my man. I could not be mistaken. I saw him alive and well in that carriage as sure as there's a God in heaven."

"How could a poor factory-worker rise to such a position?" I incredulously remarked.

"I don't know, but there he was sitting by the lady's side, and looking as happy as he used to look when he was courting me; and he saw me, too, and turned as white as death at the sight. Perhaps he thought I should die in prison for want of drink, and so married again without waiting to see. I thought of going to his mother's and asking if he is really dead; but then I changed my mind, and came here. It would be better for you to go; you know better how to get at the truth."

"You charge him with deserting you and marrying another woman?" I said, scarcely able to restrain myself.

To this she replied with a wavering affirmative, and then she produced the certificates of her marriage, and of the birth of her child, and gave me the address of her mother-in-law.

She then described minutely the place and circumstances of the meeting with her husband's counterpart, and left the Office. She left her own address also, but I had no expectation of ever needing that.

It seemed to me that the supposed fraud, forgery, and bigamy were entirely the offspring of her own drink-sodden brain, and that to ascertain that her husband was dead and buried would be so simple a matter that there was not the slightest occasion for her putting the task upon us.

Still I remember thinking— "If the man is really alive I hope he will really be nimble enough to escape me. It would be an actual blessing to such a man if the jade fell down stairs and broke her neck."

In the afternoon I went to the address of the mother. The house was a small one in Greenside, but the woman appeared a respectable widow, and I found her quietly preparing the supper of her sons, two of whom supported her.

She seemed a superior person to be in such a situation, and noting that fact I guessed that her son, though a poor worker, must have had some education and natural refinement.

I told her that I had called to make some inquiries about her son, and she probably thought I meant one of the younger members of her family, for she smiled brightly and invited me to enter. While I accepted the offer I studied her quiet and somewhat shadowed features, and quickly decided that I had before me a woman who, if she had occasion, could throw as many obstacles in my way as any one who ever hampered a detective.

"It is your son Richard, I mean," I quietly continued as I sat down at the clean, little fire-place.

The mother gave a great start, and I saw the hands busy at the supper grow suddenly tremulous. She looked at me, too, but it was not so much a look of surprise as of searching inquiry or suspicion.

''What about him?" she cautiously returned, when she had recovered somewhat.

"I want to know where he lives, what he does, and all about him," I quickly answered. I fully expected her to blurt out, possibly with tears, that her son was dead; but no such words rose to her lips. She stared at me keenly for a moment or two, as if trying to discover from my appearance what was the nature of my occupation, and then she said—

"What are you? a Sheriff-officer or something of that kind?"

"Something of that kind," I lightly returned. "Now about your son Richard. Is it true that he is dead?"

"I suppose that fiend that he married has sent ye here?" she said with great energy, "but if she has ye'll get naething oot o' me."

"Well, but you told her he was dead," I persisted; "either he is dead or he is not."

"Ay."

"And you showed her a certificate of death bearing his name."

"I did."

"If you altered that name you committed a felony, and are liable to arrest and imprisonment."

"Am I? I'm no feared," she answered with a sneer and a toss of the head.

"Will you let me see that certificate?"

"Humph! will I, indeed? Ye'll see nae papers here, I can tell ye."

"We can force it."

"Force awa' then— naebody's hindering ye."

"Come, come, now— it's quite evident to me that you have something to conceal," I said, fairly baffled.

"Everybody has," she grimly returned.

"Perhaps your son has paid you to be silent."

A flashing look was the answer; it said scornfully— "as if that would be necessary?"

"Did you forge the certificate?"

"Humph!" The grunt was utterly derisive of me and my powers. After trying  her for nearly half an hour I gave the old woman up in despair and left, determined to overhaul the books of the registrar for the district. I did so for a period extending over the two years, but could find no record of such a death. I had not expected to find it. The strange reticence of the mother had convinced me that I had misjudged the broken wife, and that the man was really alive.

My visit to the registrar was productive of one discovery, however, which pointed to a solution to one mystery. I found recorded the death of one Richard Hanford, aged 58 years, spouse of the old woman who had proved so intractable under my questioning.

By referring to the broken wife I discovered that she had never thought of looking at the age of the deceased as recorded in the certificate of the father's death which had been shown her, with a view to severing the connection for ever.

Back I went to the old woman's home, only to find her flown, and the house shut up and empty. She had taken alarm, then, and deemed flight the most easy way out of her difficulties.

I had now no clue whatever to the discovery of Hanford, and, truth to tell, was not sorry. I heartily hoped that he, too, had taken alarm and left the city, and that I should thus hear no more of the case.

But the broken wife, from the hour of the first meeting, had never rested. She was continually on the prowl, never going to her work, seldom eating or sleeping, and almost forgetting to drink.

The result was that one night, in watching a quiet hotel or boarding-house at the West End, she saw a man come out and hurry towards a waiting cab, and flew across and pinned him in her arms with his foot on the steps.

"Dick! Dick Hanford! look at me and say why you have tried to make me believe you were dead?" she cried, in frenzied tones.

The man was alone, and did not seem greatly surprised, though he was laboring under great excitement and emotion.

"Call me John Ferguson," he said, tremulously, without trying to push her off or escape.

"Dick Hanford is dead— dead to every one."

"Not to me, for I am still your wife," she excitedly returned. "Oh, Dick! I am bad, and weak, and foolish— maybe mad at times— but I love you; and 1 want to be better, and get back my bairn that they say I nearly killed. I think it would keep me from falling. Oh, give me one more chance! I thought you were both in the grave, and that I had put you there, but when I found you alive a new life seemed to spring up in me."

"Call me John Ferguson— Dick Hanford is dead," he still answered, in low, husky tones.

He dismissed the cab, and motioned to the broken wife to follow him out to the dark road beyond the city, where they could converse unseen and unheard. He would not say he was married to another woman, nor would he admit that he was Hanford, or the broken woman's husband, though his grave, earnest manner, his gentleness, and every thrill of his voice convinced her of his identity, if such convincing had been needed.

"I am nothing to yon, or you to me," he said, and with a pang she noticed that he never even touched her or offered her his arm. ''We are strangers; our ways are different; far apart; just ns much sundered as if we were both dead, and buried at different sides of the globe. But I have money now, and I am willing to give you that, if it will do you any good, just to relieve my own mind, if you will let me go in peace. Why should we fight over a dead past. Say how much you want, and it shall be yours, though it should be every penny I own."

"I don't want money, but the bairn I nearly killed," cried the weeping wife. "Money would curse me, but the bairn might lift me up. I'm not the first lost wretch that has been pulled up to Heaven by a bairn's wee hand. "

"That can never be," said the husband, decidedly. "More likely you would drag him down with you. Be content with the ill you've done. Freddy is dead."

"I don't believe it," screamed the broken wife. "He is hidden from me, not dead. I will make a bargain with you. If your love for me is dead, go your way in peace, but leave me the bairn. I'll sell my rights for him. Is it a bargain? or must I put you in prison?"

"You can do neither," was the agitated reply. " You cannot put me in prison, and you cannot touch the boy. You will never see him again. He is far beyond your reach."

They quarreled over that point, and had to separate without arrangement. Janet Hanford came to me the same night, demanding that I should arrest the "bigamist," as she declared him to be, and also hunt out her boy, wherever he was hidden, as the care of the child would legally fall to her, who had committed no offence against the moral law. A light task, certainly."

In the first place, I found that the accused persisted that he was not Richard Hanford, but John Ferguson. He had been at the Cape for nearly two years, so he had no one to whom he could refer in confirmation of his statement. He was very hazy as to his antecedents.

He had prospered at the Cape, he admitted, but would not say that the money he now possessed had come to him by marriage; he would not admit that he was married at all to the lady who accompanied him, though it was proved that at the private hotel at which they resided they were known as Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson. The lady herself being referred to declined to say whether she was married or not; and when she took up that position, I need not say that our chance of bringing home to him a charge of bigamy was poor indeed.

Then there remained the charge of desertion, but that could scarcely be brought forward, seeing that the wife had been in prison, serving a term of two years, while he had been away at the Cape, and had but recently returned, and so might be supposed not to know that she was alive.

But the weaker Janet Hanford's case grew the more determined and desperate she seemed to become. John Ferguson's wife had a maidservant to attend her, and Janet Hanford appears to have taken to watching the girl.

One forenoon, when the case was at its most critical point— that is, when there were evidences that John Ferguson and his wife would soon be out of the country— the broken wife saw this girl leave the hotel with two letters in her hand.

The girl walked rapidly along Princes street with the intention of posting them at the General Post Office; but, before she had gone two divisions, Janet Hanford became a highway robber by snatching the letters from her hand and vanishing like magic.

One of the letters was addressed to "Master Frederick Hanford," at a boarding school some miles from the city, and almost before the amazed girl got back to her master Janet Hanford was in a railway carriage and speeding towards that school.

The letter she had stolen proved beyond a doubt that John Ferguson was Richard Hanford, and father of the boy, and also revealed the fact that it had been Hanford's intention to remove the boy in a day or two, as he was "leaving the country." Janet Hanford stopped all that by taking a policeman with her and demanding that the boy— who readily recognized her as his mother— should be delivered up to her.

The grief and consternation of the father were terrible to behold, and we had now the singular case of two persons charging each other with a crime, and each demanding the other's arrest.

Hanford made the most strenuous attempts to get back the custody of his boy— who was lame and rather weakly— but failed completely, though he had money and lawyers to help him.

An inquiry had been by that time despatched to the Cape to ascertain whether the so-called John Ferguson had been legally married to Rosa Gladwin, the girl who in Scotland had passed as his wife.

In anticipation of the answer to that question being against him, Hanford redoubled his exertions to quicken the slow processes of law which were to give him charge of his boy, but with almost the same result as if he had single handed tried to push on some great Juggernaut.

The ponderous thing moved none the faster, but all the heat and turmoil and excitement fell to Hanford. He was continually running between his temporary home and his lawyers, and in one of the races he caught a chill which he had not time to attend to.

When the pain became unbearable he was forced to lie down and send for a doctor. By that time he was almost delirious and in a high fever. The doctor pronounced the trouble to be inflammation of the lungs, and the case critical.

The moment Janet Hanford heard of the illness she came to see her husband, bringing with her the boy, whom she had hitherto kept studiously out of sight.

She was loud in her self-recriminations. She blamed herself for the calamity, in grovelling grief cried aloud to Heaven to witness her vows that if Hanford's life were only spared she would restore his boy, suffer him to leave the country with his father, and never more seek to molest either, or wish for anything but their welfare and happiness.

Theory was vain; the resolve came too late. Hanford scarcely knew her, and appeared to be living the misfortunes of his life over again, for when his eye did light on her face he implored those present to take her away from him, or at least to save the boy from her remorseless hands.

In a day or two he died, turning from her with aversion, and speaking of his other attendant as his true and only wife, and denouncing Janet Hanford as a curse to herself and all mankind.

Of course these delirious utterances could not be taken for his real feelings; indeed, his second wife afterwards assured Janet that the love he bore her was greater than that which he had conceived for herself— it was merely the outside shell of wretchedness and debauchery which he loathed and detested.

There was no more concealment of the truth then.

It was freely admitted that Hanford had married again out at the Cape, getting a rich settler's daughter and a little fortune by the union, as well as the unselfish devotion of a woman who knew the whole of his past life, and yet did not hesitate to sacrifice her all for his sake.

A strange result sprang from that deathbed scene.

The second wife imbibed a strong affection for the lame boy, and could not think of part with him; at the same time a feeling of pity grew up in her breast for the broken wife, who was so prostrated by her great loss that for weeks her life was despaired of.

Rosa Gladwin nursed her through it all, and, I suppose, must have discovered in her some good qualities, which were hid from ordinary onlookers, for when Mrs. Hanford fairly recovered they did not separate.

At first Rosa offered to provide for her by settling on her an annuity quite sufficient for her wants, but the proposal was never carried out.

They went out to the Cape together, and no sisters could have been more firmly bound together in affection. Neither of them ever married again, but their lives have been spent in watching the development of Hanford's son, who is no longer a lame boy, but a strong man, bidding fair to leave a big mark in the world's history.

The most singular thing in the case, however, is the fact that Janet Hanford left her drunkeness and debasement in the grave which swallowed her husband. Truly there is hope for all, even for the White Slave.

___________________

11:  A Dream of Murder.

THE MISSING MAN, David Comyn, was under gamekeeper on an estate a good many miles west of Edinburgh. Like the most ignorant and brutish men, when invested with a little brief authority, Comyn was generally disliked in the district; but in this case there seems to have been more ground than usual for the feeling. Comyn was drunken and unprincipled, and was known to accept bribes in fair proportion to the means of any one he caught poaching. He was reckless and extravagant, up to the ears in debt, and even then under notice to quit his place.

A sheriff-officer had been at his cottage the day before to see what furniture there was to poind, and had been grievously disappointed with the result, and other creditors were bestirring themselves so actively in the same direction that Comyn had seriously begun to consider how he could best vanish from the place, taking all he could with him. Fate was to settle the question for him in a manner he never had dreamed of.

It was on a soft November evening that the disappearance took place. Comyn stood for a few minutes outside his cottage, speaking with his wife, in the quiet gloaming.

It was his usual time for starting on a tour through the plantations. Sometimes the round occupied but an hour or two; at others it might be two or three o'clock in the morning before he returned. He was in rather a bad temper, and scolded his wife about some inattention on her part to the feeding of the pig, but there was nothing in his manner or conversation to indicate that he meditated a prolonged absence. He carried no gun, but had a game bag slung by his side lest he should pick up any on the way. He carried in his hand a stout stick with a heavy head, which everyone knew he could use for more than support in walking. He was a big, powerful fellow, and with that stick in his hands was quite as safe as with a double-barreled gun.

"Are ye goin' across by the march?" asked his wife as he turned away.

"No, they've been there wi' the ploo's, and it's heavy walking," he answered, in a sullen tone. "I'll gang by Whinny Head and Craig End."

A young collie dog, which Comyn had in training, at that moment ran out of the house, and sought to accompany him. Comyn swore at the dog; kicked it back into the house; made it howl with the wight of his stick, and then disappeared into the shades of evening. His wife saw him strike across a field near by for the first plantation, and then turned into the house, muttering that scathing comment which has been used by nearly every wife from Mother Eve downwards— "Grumblin' brute!"

Having thus relieved herself, and little dreaming that she was looking upon her husband for the last time in life, Jen Comyn turned into the house, and in two hours was sound asleep in bed. The door remained unlocked during the whole night, and Jen, aroused about five in the morning by her child crying, was surprised to note the hour and find that her husband had not returned. She felt no alarm or concern, but simply quieted her child and went to sleep again. Comyn did not appear at breakfast time, and Jen made up her mind that he must have caught some one and had to lug him off to jail, and that, as a natural result, he would be in a fearfully bad temper when he did appear.

"I'll jist let him flyte awa' and answer never a word," was her wise resolve, only, like wise resolves, it came too late.

The day wore away; Comyn did not appear, and the head gamekeeper reported that he was not to be seen anywhere on the estate. No one had met him or cast eyes on him since he left Jen at the cottage door, so far as his superior could learn, and he was not slow to give his opinion that Comyn was merely shirking duty, and away at the nearest town having a drinking bout. Jen thought differently, but did not say so. She knew that Comyn was in dread of imprisonment for debt, and that he had spoken of going to another part of the country, and then sending word to her to follow when he should be safely settled. Jen's swift thought was that he had suddenly made up his mind to go that night, and that her best course would be a prudent silence.

"If onything had come owre him," she reasoned, meaning any calamity or accident, "he wad have been found by this time. He has heard some word after he gaed oot, and slippit awa' in the nicht time."

Strange, some of the Craig End people, and others in the adjacent town, showed more tender solicitude over Comyn than his own wife. These were his creditors. They showed genuine grief over his disappearance. They had the wood scoured for miles around; they had his house searched and watched; and the police bounded on to hunt for the missing man as energetically as if he had been beloved of the whole community, a touching proof that the meanest among us my be sadly missed when he is gone.

The cool demeanor of Jen did not escape notice. If anything serious had happened to her husband his wife would have shown grief. It was evident, folk said, that Jen knew perfectly well where her husband was concealed; and her protests to the contrary were received with significant winks and skeptical grins. Jen, from being looked upon as a dull-pated country wench, was suddenly exalted to a person of superior cunning and genius in dodging. After that none of us need despair of a reputation. Like the dew's of the morning, it may come unbidden, and afterwards vanish as swiftly.

Now, up to this point the anxious ones had done their best and failed, and all interest in Comyn was dying away. It was believed that he had shown a clean pair of heels, and all but Jen began to be reconciled to the loss. The wife was in a sad fix. She believed her husband to be in safety, but then he was so securely hidden that not even she could find him. She was under notice to quit the cottage, and had not the faintest idea whither to turn her steps.

At this point occurred the strange revelation which led to me being called out to assist in the case. At first it was only a whisper which passed from mouth to mouth, but by-and-by a name was given, and some outlines of the dream, and then one of the county police took the trouble to call on Jake Binning the ploughman, or farm hand, with whom the rumor originated.

Jake was both reticent and skeptical, and disposed to laugh at the serious aspect of the county constable. He didn't believe in dreams, he said, so what good could come of repeating one that he had had.

All this coyness on the part of Jake only quickened the curiosity of the constable, and then he succeeded in extracting from Jake the extraordinary narrative which caused them to send for me. Dreams, at best, are but filmy clues for a detective to work upon, but in the present case it will be seen that the dream itself was not the most extraordinary feature. Here is the substance of Jake Binning's statement as it was afterwards repeated to me:—

On the night of Comyn's disappearance Binning was confined to the house with a sore heel, which had kept him off his work during the day. His wife happened to be confined to bed at the same time, and Binning was able to "hirple about" and attend to her. Their cottage was one of a row near the place called Whinny Head, past which Comyn had stated his intention of going.

Being thus precluded from taking active exercise, Jake went early to bed— bow early he could not say, as his wife was asleep at the time and she was better remembering these things than he.

But Jake bad not been long in bed and asleep when he found himself in a vision, looking down on a tangled brake or wood quite unknown to him. The spot seemed to be a small bill, covered with pines and underbrush, and having in its center a whinstone quarry, quite dry and disused, and also clothed round its sides with underbrush of broom, brambles, wild rasps and whins. A grassy path skirted the edge of the quarry, and on that open path the moon was shining brightly.

As a matter of fact I found that there was no moon at all on the night of Comyn's disappearance, but in dreams one must not look for absolute accuracy.

Jake seemed to be looking down on that path— which in actual life he had never seen— in the clearest moonlight, and with a strange tremor of apprehension. He felt that something tragic was about to happen under his eyes, yet had not the power to drag himself from the horrifying spectacle. His feet clung o the ground; his knees refused to work on their hinges; and even grabbing at the trees to pull himself away did not draw him an inch from the spot.

While he vainly struggled, the tragedy which he sought to avoid seeing began by the appearance of a man as strange to him as the spot.

He was a short, broad shouldered fellow, roughly clad, and apparently accustomed to the roads; he had a bundle or box slung from his shoulders by a canvas strap, and carried in his right hand two pheasants. As he emerged from the shade of the tree, this broad shouldered man stooped, and was about to stowaway the two birds in his wallet or box when Comyn appeared at the opposite end of the grassy path, shouting out the words—

"Hullo you I what are ye aboot now?"

The dreamer recognized Comyn at a glance, and knew his voice perfectly. The thick-set man started up, and, without completing the stowing away of the pheasants, turned to fly, but Comyn, with a ferocious spring and swift race, got up to him before he could re-enter the wood, and the two were speedily locked together in a deadly embrace. Neither appeared to get any advantage, for what the poacher lacked in height he seemed to have in muscle, and Comyn neither succeeded in overpowering or in felling the man with his stick, though he made several desperate attempts at both.

Comyn did all the shouting and swearing, threatening his opponent with all the terrors of the law. The short man never opened his month, but gradually forced Comyn towards the edge of the grassy path overlooking the quarry." Neither appeared aware of the danger, and the horrified dreamer tried in vain to scream out a warning. The right leg of the short man was twisted suddenly about those of Comyn, and a quick wrench and push sent the unfortunate keeper backwards over the edge of the rock into the quarry. Comyn fell head foremost close to the side of the quarry, and was instantly hidden from sight by some bracken growing at the foot of the rock. The short man appeared greatly horrified, and stood stupidly staring before him, with his head bent on one side as if listening for any sounds of life from below. Then he got down on his knees, crept to the edge of the rocks, and peeped over, but evidently saw no sign of his opponent. After a long scrutiny the scared man moved along the path and down an adjacent slope, and so got round to the entrance of the quarry, which he crossed. He then began groping and searching among the bracken till he came on the body of Comyn. It lay in a recess of the rock, with the head bent under it, as if the neck had been broken in the fall, the man had chanced to touch the face in groping, and his fingers came out into the moonlight covered with blood. He shuddered and wiped his hands on the grass, and turned and hastily left the quarry. He was so scared and upset that at first he forgot the box or wallet and the two pheasants up on the grassy path, but after a minute or two returned, secured these, and made off across the country at a rapid rate.

That was the substance of Jake Binning's dream of murder.

Being asked if he thought he could recognize the spot seen in his dream, he said he believed he could, but was sure that there was no such place in that quarter.

Asked again if he could identify the murderer, he was not so decided in his reply. He could describe the man minutely enough, yet seemed uncertain whether he could identify him.

Now, when this narrative was first delivered to the chief constable there was present the head gamekeeper, and this man no sooner heard the quarry described than he said very decisively—

''Yon mean Craigie's Cutting, the old quarry that was used to build Craig End, and then closed again?"

"Where's that? I never heard of it," was Jake Binning's answer, and then the gamekeeper explained that the place in question was in the center of one of the plantations not well known, because surrounded by cultivated fields and far back from the road.

It was used chiefly as a rearing ground for young game, and at certain seasons was very closely watched by the keepers on that account. Binning could not say whether it was likely to be that spot or not, but thought it might be worth while to have the quarry searched.

The same evening, therefore, the chief constable, with two of his men and the gamekeeper, proceeded to the secluded spot named Craigie's Cutting.

The gamekeeper was averse to making the search, though not strongly so, averring that he had already searched the place thoroughly, and found no trace of either the missing man or a murder.

He laughed derisively at Jake's dream, and freely expressed an opinion that Jake's head that night had contained more whiskey than was good for the owner.

The police superintendent was inclined to think differently, possibly being of a more superstitious cast of mind.

Under the guidance of the gamekeeper, about fifteen minute's walking brought them to Craigie's Cutting.

They lighted two lamps which they had brought, and walked across the quarry to the spot described so accurately by Binning in his dream.

There was the bracken at the foot of the rock; there was the natural recess he had described; and, on parting the bushes, and holding forward the lamps, there was the body of a man!

The gamekeeper looked grave and startled, and somewhat foolish; the superintendent jubilant, the natural result of finding themselves wrong and right.

Very carefully they lifted out the body, which lay with the head doubled up under it, and then ascertained beyond doubt that it was that of David Comyn.

There were few injuries and little blood discernible; death had evidently been swift, and caused by the breaking of the neck. Under the bracken which had hidden the body they found the stout walking stick which Comyn had been known to carry.

The four men stood staring at each other in awe and wonderment. Every particular of the dream seemed confirmed. Comyn's death had evidently been caused by a fall from the top of the quarry; the only possibility remaining was that he might have gone over by accident.

They left the body and ascended to the grassy path.

More confirmation. There were most palpable traces of a struggle immediately above the spot where the body lay; the turfy ground was indented, torn, and scraped, as by heavy feet in fierce conflict.

The death had not been accidental. The whole revelation seemed supernatural and astounding, and there came additional confirmation.

The body of Comyn was conveyed to his home, and on the way thither the chief constable said—

"I believe I know a character answering the description of the man who did it. His character isn't the best, and though he professes to be a hawker, and has a license, he doesn't confine himself to that. Many a hundred pounds' worth of game has passed through Pate Coulter's hands."

"Coulter?" observed one of the constables. "I saw him three or four days ago about five miles from here. He was going in the direction of Edinburgh, and had his box slung over his back."

"Strange! and he does not move about with anything like regularity. He might not be in this quarter for six months again," continued the chief constable. "Strange that he should have been here, or near here, on that night. And the description fits him perfectly— and would fit no other that I know."

The sensation caused by these investigations and discoveries in that quiet country place is indescribable.

Had the police had their own way the whole would have been kept secret for a time at least, but Jake Binning had made no secret of his dream, and the rest speedily oozed out.

But meanwhile the telegraph had been at work, and I was requested to look after the mysterious hawker seen in Jake's dream.

It seemed to me that this message came far too late. I did not know that the hawker in question moved but slowly at times, and I quite despaired of picking him up in Edinburgh.

But quickly following the telegram came the chief constable himself, and from him I learned a number of particulars regarding the man we sought.

Among other things, I was told that Peter Coulter was a great crony with carriers and farmers, and frequently got a lift in their carts. This induced me to pay a visit to the Grassmarket, and the constable accompanied me.

A number of these carriers and farmers put up in that quarter, and among so many from the districts surrounding the city it seemed strange to me if we did not come on some clue to the whereabouts of Pate Coulter.

Be it observed I had absolutely no expectation of finding the actual man there. We had gone through two of the inns without coming on any information of importance, when I was surprised by my companion saying, quickly—

"Why, there's Pate himself!"

I looked in the direction indicated, and saw two carriers and a short, muscular-looking man of forty-five or so seated drinking together.

The man we sought appeared quite cool and unconcerned, and nodded familiarly to my companion.

He had a rather cunning eye, and seemed a knowing fellow altogether, but there was nothing depraved or brutal about the expression of his face.

"I've been looking for you, Pate Coulter," said my companion. "Are you staying here?"

"Yes, sir— grand weather," was the hearty reply.

"Then get your things and come away with us," coldly continued the constable.

Quite a puzzled look overspread the hawker's face, and at length, after a scratch at his towsy pow, he said—

"Guidness me, what's the maitter? Do ye think I've been poaching?"

"Oh, you've done that, too, in your day, I daresay," answered my companion; "but this officer, Detective M'Govan, wants you on a much more serious charge."

Pate's alarmed gaze fell upon me, and there was something comical in his aspect.

"Preserve me, is that M'Govan?" he said, concernedly; "and what do ye want wi' me?"

"You are wanted on a charge of murder," I answered, trying to look grave, which was no easy matter.

"Murder?" he vacantly returned; "murdering some useless bit rabbitie or hare, ye mean?"

"No, not a hare or rabbit— a man," and I swiftly warned him to say nothing more than he could help.

"Humph! I've naething to be feared for," was Pate's scornful reply. "Murdered a man? Did onybody ever hear the like? My manny, ye've made a mistak' this time. Div I look like a murderer?"

Truth to tell he did not, but then appearances go for nothing in cases of that kind. Some of the most gentlemanly-looking fellows have made their last bow on the gallows.

We took Pate away and searched him. He wore a loose sack coat, and under that a deep waistcoat, of light moleskin, and this waistcoat, at the left side, under the arm, was deeply stained with blood.

"It was only a hare, gentlemen— a hare that I was commissioned to carry into the toon," quickly observed Pate. "It had got gie sair hashed aboot the head, and I was feared some policeman might think it was a poached ane," he added with a sly look, " so I carried it under my jacket."

Questioned closely, Pate admitted that he had killed the hare with his stick. He had come on it asleep on the road— a likely story!— and smashed it dead on the spot.

In his declaration he stated that he had passed along the public road near Craig End on the afternoon before Comyn's disappearance.

He knew Comyn by sight, but had not seen him for many a day— six months at least. He had no idea where Comyn was to be found at that moment— he might be in the moon for aught he knew.

Yes, he knew Craigie's Cutting. It was an old quarry. He had seen it worked for stones long ago.

No, most decidedly he was not near Craigie's Cutting on the night after he passed Craig End. He was certain of that; he hadn't time to go as far, and never thought of going— why should he? Did he not pass through the wood surrounding that quarry, and on the way kill two pheasants?

Pate looked perfectly thunderstruck at the question, and answered with such haste and warmth as to make in his answer rather a cool admission.

"No, I didna!" was his indignant reply. "I havena killed a pheasant for mony a day, and they'd be clever that wad kill ane there, where the place is sae weel watched."

He had not been nearer the quarry than Whinny Head, where he sold some of his small wares. He remembered that distinctly.

It was about three or four in the afternoon, and if they didn't believe him, they could ask the people at that row of farmhands' cottages.

It was mother-o'-pearl buttons he had sold, and it was a man who bought them. He declared he would know the man again, though he had seen him then for the first time.

The man was not lame, and did not limp when he walked, so far as Pate could see.

This was nearly all that was contained in Coulter's declaration, and he was locked up. Then I went out to Whinny Head and brought in the man Binning to see the prisoner.

Binning did not seem inclined to come, and shuffled hard to get out of the task. He was quite sure he could not identify the face— faces in dreams were so hazy and indistinct, and sometimes one face seems to change into another.

As I was firm, however, he had to accompany me, and the result was exactly what I had expected, with a little more added on, which was expected by neither of us.

When Jake Binning was shown Pate Coulter he hesitated, looked again, asked the hawker to speak so that he might hear the tone of his voice, and finally said the prisoner "was like the man he had seen in his dream in size and form, but the face was not the same."

This was disappointing, and I began to distrust Binning. It seemed to me that he had, for some reason, made up his mind not to identify Pate. But a startling surprise was in store for us both. Just as Binning concluded Pate shouted out—

"That's the man I saw at Whinny Head and selt the buttons to, and there's the very buttons on his waistcoat," and as he spoke Pate indicated three mother o' pearl buttons, which did not exactly match the others on Binning's waistcoat.

"You've made a mistake," said Binning, turning pale. "I never saw you in my life before."

"What? Do you think I'm daft?" returned the pedlar. "I have the rest o' the buttons in my box yet; and do ye no mind hoo ye grudged the price, and wad hue the odd ha'penny struck aff?"

Binning denied the whole most vociferously, got confused, contradicted himself in some little particulars, and finally appeared in a great hurry to get away.

"Look after that fellow, Mr. M'Govan." said Pate to me in a whisper, as I left the place, "for if he's no the murderer himself, he kens something about it."

I went to Pate's box, being accompanied with much reluctance by Binning, and turned out his small stock, when I came upon a paper of mother o' pearl buttons from which some had been removed, and which matched exactly the three odd ones on Binning's waistcoat.

After consultation, it was my duty to inform the clever dreamer that he was arrested and formally detained, charged with being concerned in the murder. He appeared to lose his head for a moment, for he blurted out—

"I can swear I never meant— I mean, never killed the man."

The words were taken down, but very little more did we get out of Binning. His declaration only amounted to a strong protest of innocence.

But then we had his former statement to fall back upon. I found, on investigation, that Binning had not been lame or confined to the house on the night of the murder; indeed, I came upon one witness who had seen him and spoke to him at least a mile from his house, and at a very late hour, that night.

His own wife could not say for certain that her husband had been in the house all the evening, as she had been asleep most of the time, and in the "ben" end of the house.

After a week's meditation in prison Binning got permission to make a second statement.

His new declaration was practically a confession of the murder. He had been wearied with the day's confinement in the house and the nursing of his wife, and had gone out after dark when she was asleep.

He declared that he only wanted a walk in the fresh air, but it was thought that he would not have missed the chance of a rabbit or hare if it had come in his way.

The rest of his declaration was simply a repetition of the incidents of his "dream," with this difference, that, instead of the pedlar figuring as the doer of the deed, he occupied that place himself.

Comyn had charged him with poaching, which he indignantly replied that he had no such thought or intention in his head, and, as for trespassing, he said "he would walk owre a' God's earth in spite o' him and his maister, as lang's he kent he was daein' nae harm."

The answer seemed to enrage Comyn, for they immediately closed, with the fatal result already described.

The dream was an after thought, and the idea of introducing the figure of the pedlar as he had appeared at his own door came to him only when he thought that the man would be safely out of reach.

His object was, by being the first to direct attention to where the body lay, to effectually draw suspicion away from himself.

When Binning's trial came on Pate was ready to appear as a witness against him— though it had nearly been the other way— but Binning pleaded guilty to a charge of culpable homicide, and no witnesses were called.

His sentence was two years' imprisonment.

Whether he actually told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in his account of the murder, lies "between him and the lang day."

___________________

12: The Wrong Umbrella.

A WHALE has been known to crunch up a whole boat in its mouth with the greatest ease and impunity, and yet at some future period be as easily choked by a sprat.

A very worthy friend of mine, a sea captain, sailed the whole world over, and battled successfully the most terrific seas and storms, but one day, after he had settled in Edinburgh, he went down to the Queen's Park and got drowned in that insignificant puddle called Dunsappie Loch.

It is not always the big things which pull a man down, and many a thief escapes easily with a big haul, who, a month or two after, is limed for some act not involving the value of a shilling.

But for a turn of this kind, I believe, the real facts in the present case would never have been brought to light.

The plan was so ingenious and so cunningly devised, and the principal so far removed from the ranks of professional criminals, that it is no wonder we were puzzled and nonplussed.

I shall begin with, the first case, that the reader may understand and share our mystification.

A gentleman drove up to a Prince street jeweler's in a carriage or a cab— the jeweler was not sure which, but inclined to think that it was a private carriage— in broad daylight, and at the most fashionable hour.

He was rather a pretty-faced young man, of the languid, Lord Dundreary type, with long, soft whiskers, which he stroked fondly during the interview with the tradesman, and wore fine clothes of the newest cut with the air of one who was utterly exhausted with the trouble of displaying his own wealth and beauty.

He wore patent boots fitting him like a glove, and appeared particularly vain of his neat feet and the valuable rings on his white fingers.

When this distinguished customer had been accommodated with a seat by the jeweler— whom I may name Mr. Ward— he managed to produce a card-case, and then dropped a card bearing the name of Samuel Whitmore.

The address at the corner at once gave the jeweler a clear idea of the identity of his customer. The Whitmores were a wealthy family having an estate of considerable size in the West, and had, in addition to the fine house on that estate, a town residence in Edinburgh and other in England.

There was a large family of them, but only one son; a id that gentleman the jeweler now understood he had the pleasure of seeing before him.

He was said to be a fast young man, with no great intellect, but traits of that kind are not so uncommon among the rich as to excite comment among trademen.

The follies of some are the food of others, and the jeweler was no sooner aware of the identity of his visitor than he mentally deided that he w'as about to get a good order. He was not disappointed— at least in that particular.

"I want your advice and assistance, Mr. Ward, as to the best sort of thing to give— ah —to a young lady— you know— as a present," languidly began the pretty young gentlemen. "It must be real tip-top thing— artistic, pretty, and all that; and you must be willing to take it back if she shouldn't like it— that is, in exchange for something as good or better."

"Hadn't we better send a variety of articles to the young lady, and let her choose for herself?" suggested Mr. Ward.

"Oh, hang it, no!—that would never do," said Mr. Whitmore with considerable energy. "She'd stick to the lot, you know; women are never satisfied;" and he gave a peculiar wink to convey the idea he wished to express. "You just be good enough to show me the things, and I'll choose what I think best, and you can send them to the house addressed to me. I'll take them to her myself to-morrow, and if they don't suit. I'll send them back by my valet, or bring them myself."

All this was fair and quite business-like, and Mr. Ward hastened to display his most tempting treasures to his customer, who, however, speedily rejected the best of them on account of their high price.

At length he chose a lady's small gold lever, ornamented with jewels on the back, and a set of gold ear-rings, with brooch and necklet to match. The price of the whole came to a trifle under £60, and the buyer expressed much satisfaction at the reasonable charges and the beauty of the articles.

"You will put them up carefully and send them home, and, if I keep them, you can send in your bill at the usual time," said the agreeable customer; and so the pleasant transaction concluded, the jeweler showed him out. the cab was entered, and Mr. Whitmore not only disappeared from the jeweler's sight, but also, as it seemed, from every one else's.

As he left the shop the languid gentleman had looked at his watch, and the jeweler had just time to notice that it was an expensive gold one, with a very peculiar dial of gold figures on a black ground.

Some reference had also been made to diamonds during the selection of the presents, and Mr, Whitmore had been obliging enough to remove one of the rings from his white fingers land place it in the hands of the jeweler, when that gentleman read inside the initials "S. W."

These two circumstances were afterwards to add to the intricacy of the case when it came into our hands.

From the moment when the pretty-faced gentleman was shown out by Mr. Ward, he could not have vanished more effectually if he had driven out of the world.

Half-an-hour after, a young apprentice lad in Mr. Ward's employ took the small parcel given him by his master out to the stately residence of the Whitmores at the West End, and, according to his statement, afterwards duly delivered it.

There was no name-plate upon the door, but there was a big brass number which corresponded with that on the card left by the pleasant customer.

The messenger, who was no stupid boy, but a lad of seventeen, declared most positively that he looked for the number in that fine crescent, rang the bell, and was answered by a dignified footman.

He then asked if the house was that of the Whitmores, was answered with a stately affirmative, and then departed.

None of the articles thus sent home were returned, and they were therefore entered in the books as sold.

A month or two after the account was made up and sent to the buyer. There was no response for many weeks, but at length the answer did come, and in a manner altogether 'unexpected.

A gentleman, by no means good-looking, but still young, drove up to the shop door one afternoon and entered the shop.

Mr. Ward had never seen him before, but the card which he placed before the jeweler was familiar enough to cause him to start strangely.

It bore the name, "Samuel Whitmore," with the address at the lower corner— it was, indeed,  the facsimile of that which had been introduced by Mr. Ward's languid but agreeable customer months before.

"I wish to see Mr Ward," said the newcomer, evidently as ignorant of the jeweler's appearance as that gentleman was of his.

"I am Mr. Ward, sir," was the reply, and then the stranger brought out some papers, from which he selected Mr. Ward's account for the articles of jewelry, which he placed before the astonished tradesman, with the words—

"I am Mr. Whitmore, and this account has been sent to mo by mistake. It would have been checked sooner, but it happened that I was away in Paris when it was sent, and as I was expected home they did not trouble to forward the paper."

The jeweler stared at his visitor. He was a young man, and wore Dundreary whiskers, and had on his fingers just such rings as Mr. Ward remembered seeing on the hands of his customer, but there was not the slightest resemblance of features.

"You Mr. Samuel Whitmore?" he vacantly asked, picking up the card of that gentleman, and finally asking himself whether he was dreaming or awake.

"Mr. Samuel Whitmore," calmly answered the gentleman.

"Son of Mr. Whitmore of Castleton Lee?"

"The same, sir."

"Then you have a brother, I suppose?" stammered the jeweler. There has been a mistake of some kind."

"I have no brother, and never had," quietly answered his visitor; "and I never bought an article in this shop that I know of, and certainly did not purchase the things which you have charged against me.''

"A gentleman came here— drove up in a cab, just as you have done— and presented a card like this," said the jeweler, beginning to feel slightly alarmed. "Surely I have not been imposed upon? and yet that is impossible, for the things were safely sent home and delivered at your house."

The gentleman smiled and shook his head.

"I thought it possible that my father might have ordered and received these things," he politely observed, "but on making inquiry I learned that not only was that not the case, but no such articles ever came near the house."

This was too much for the jeweler. He touched a bell and had the apprentice lad, Edward Price, sent for, and drew from him such a minute account of the delivery of the parcel that it became the gentleman's turn to be staggered and to doubt his own convictions.

The lad described the house, the hall, and the clean-shaven footman so clearly and accurately that his narrative bore an unmistakable impress of truthfulness.

The gentleman could, therefore, only suggest the possibility of Price having mistaken the number of the house, and the things being accepted as a present by the persons who had thus received them by mistake.

That even this supposition— which was afterwards proved to be altogether wrong— did not account for the most mysterious feature in the case—how the things had been ordered, and by whom.

It was clear to Mr. Ward that the gentleman before him and the buyer of the presents were two distinct persons, having no facial resemblance, but the new Mr. Whitmore having, in his impatience to be gone, drawn from his pocket a gold watch, with the peculiar black dial already described, a fresh shade of mystery was cast over the case.

"I have seen that watch before," he ventured to say. " The gentleman who ordered the things wore just such a watch as that. I saw it when he was leaving. And he had on his finger a diamond ring very like that which you wear. I had it in my hand for a few moments, and it bore his initials inside."

The gentleman looking doubly surprised, drew from his finger the ring in question and placed it in the jeweler's hand.

The initials "S.W." were there inside, exactly as he had seen them on the ring of the mysterious representative.

"Did you ever lend this ring to any one?" he asked in amazement.

"Never; and, what is more, it is never off my finger but when I am asleep," was the decided reply; and then he listened patiently while Mr. Ward related the whole of the circumstances attending the selection of the articles.

No light was thrown on the matter by the narrative, but the gentleman, who before had been somewhat angry and impatient, now sobered down and showed sufficient interest to advise Mr. Ward to put the case in our hands, promising him every assistance in his power to get at the culprit.

This advice was acted upon, and the next day I was collecting the facts which I have already recorded.

I had no idea of the lad Price being involved in the affair, but I nevertheless thought proper to make sure of every step, and I began by taking him out to the Crescent and getting him to show me the house at which he delivered the parcel.

He conducted me without a moment's hesitation to the right house. I rang the bell, and when the door was opened by a clean-shaven footman Price rapidly identified the various features of the hall.

He failed, however, to identify the footman as the person who had taken the parcel from him.

I was not disappointed, but rather pleased at that circumstance. I had begun to believe that the footman, like the purchaser, was a "double."

Being now on the spot, I asked to see Mr. Samuel Whitmore, and being shown in I began to question that gentleman as to his whereabouts on the day of the purchase.

That was a matter not easily settled. Mr. Whitmore's time was his own, and one day was so very like another with him that he frankly told me that to answer that question was quite beyond his power.

By referring to Mr. Ward's account, however, we got the exact day and month of the purchase, and the mention of the month quickened the gentleman's memory.

That day had been one of many days spent in the same manner, for he had been two weeks confined to bed by illness. He could not give me the exact date, but I guessed rightly that his medical man would have a better idea, and, getting that gentleman's address, I soon found beyond doubt that Mr. Samuel Whitmore had on the day of the purchase been confined to his own room,  and so ill that his life was in actual danger.

"Some of his friends may have personated him for a lark," was my next thought, but a few inquiries soon dispelled that idea. None of Mr. Whitmore's friends had looked near him during his illness, and to complete the impersonation it was necessary that they should have had his ring and watch, which, he declared, had never been out of his possession.

The discovery of these facts narrowed down the inquiry considerably. They all seemed to focus towards that invisible and mysterious footman who had taken in the parcel.

There is a great deal in a name. The lad Price had used the word "footman" in describing the servant, probably because he had a vague idea that any one was a footman who wore livery and opened a door.

It had never struck him to ask if there was any other man-servant in the house, and it might not have struck me either if I had not seen another— a valet— busy brushing his young master's clothes in a bedroom close to the apartment in which we conversed.

"Who is that brushing the clothes?" I asked of Mr. Whitmore. The coachman?"

Oh, no; the coachman does not live in the house while we are in town; that's my valet."

"And what does he do?"

"Attends me— gets my clothes, helps me to dress— looks after everything, and serves me generally."

"Does he ever answer the door bell?"

"Really, I could not say," was the answer, somewhat wearily given, "but you may ask him."

The gentleman, I could see, had a sovereign contempt for both me and my calling, and was impatient to see me gone, but that, of course, did not disturb me in the least.

I had the valet called in, and in reply to my question he gave me to understand very clearly that answering the door bell was not his work, but lay entirely between the footman and tablemaid.

"Supposing they were both out of the way and you were near the door when the bell rang, would you not answer it by opening the door?"

"No, certainly not."

He appeared to think me very simple to ask such a question.

"Then, who would open the door?"

"I don't know; somebody else— it wouldn't be me; but they wouldn't be both out of the way at once without leaving some one to attend the door."

"Just so; and that one might be you— now, don't interrupt, and try to carry your mind back five months, and to the 21st day of that month, while your master here lay ill, and tell me if you did not answer the door bell and take in a small parcel addressed to your master?"

"I wasn't here five months ago, sir," was the quick response; "I was serving in the north then."

"Indeed!" and I turned to his master in some surprise; "have you discharged your valet within that time?"

"Oh, yes," he lazily drawled, had Atkinson before him."

"At the time you were ill?"

"Possibly so. I really don't remember."

"You did not tell me of this before."

"No? Well it doesn't matter much, I suppose!"

I found it difficult to keep my temper. I had the lad Price brought up from the hall, and he said most decidedly that the valet before us was not the man who had taken in the parcel.

"Why did Atkinson leave you?" I resumed, to the master.

"He did not leave exactly. I was tired of him; he put on so many airs that some thought that he was the master and I the man— fact, I assure you. He was too fast, and conceited, and vain, and I thought— though I'd be the last to say it— he wasn't quite what you call honest, you know."

"Good-looking fellow?"

"Oh, passable, as to that," was the somewhat grudging reply. Mr. Whitmore himself was very ugly.

"Did he ever put on your clothes— that is, wear them when you were not using them yourself ?"

"Oh, yes; the beggar had impudence enough for anything."

"And your jewelry, and watch, too, I suppose? "

"Well, I don't know as to that— perhaps he did. I could believe him capable of anything that was impudent— coolest rascal I ever met. I tell you what, Mr.— Mr. — Mr. M'Fadden— I beg your pardon, M'Gadden— ah, I'm not good at remembering names— I tell you, I've an idea; just struck me, and you're as welcome to it as if it were your own. P'r'aps that rascal Atkinson has ordered those things and got them when they were sent home. Rather smart of me to think of that, eh?

"Very smart," I answered, with great emphasis, while his valet grinned behind a coat. "The affinity of great minds is shown in the fact that the same idea struck me. Can you help me to Atkinson's present address?"

He could. Although he had been wearied and disgusted with the fellow himself, he had not only given Atkinson a written character of a high order, but personally recommended him to one of his acquaintances, with whom, he presumed, the man was still serving.

I took down the address and left for Moray Place, taking the lad Price with me. When we came to the house a most distinguished looking individual opened the door—much haughtier and more dignified than a Lord of State— and while he was answering my inquiries the lad Price gave me a suggestive nudge.

When I quickly turned in reply and bent my ear, he whispered—

"That's like the man that took the parcel from me at Whitmore's."

"Like him? Can you swear it is him?"

The lad took another steady look at the haughty flunkey, and finally shook his head and said, "No, he couldn't swear to him, but it was like him."

The haughty individual was John Atkinson, formerly valet to Mr. Whitmore.

A few questions, a second look at the lad Price, and one naming of Mr. Ward, the jeweler, disturbed his highness greatly, but failed to draw from him anything but the most indignant protestations of innocence.

I decided to risk the matter and take him with me. He insisted upon me first searching his room, and turning over all his possessions to show that none of the articles were in his keeping.

I felt certain of his guilt. There was in his manner an absence of that flurry and excitement with which the innocent always greet an accusation of the kind; but his cool request as to searching made me a little doubtful of bringing the charge home to him.

It convinced me, at least, that the articles themselves were far beyond our reach. From this I reasoned that they had not been procured for the ordinary purposes of robbery—that is, to be sold or turned into money.

The buyer had said that they were intended as a present for a lady—could it be possible that he had told the truth?

I began to have a deep interest in Atkinson's love affairs, and a strong desire to learn who was the favored lady.

On our way to the office I called in at Mr. Ward's, but the jeweler failed to identify Atkinson as the buyer of the articles.

He was like him, he said, but the other had Dundreary whiskers, and this man was clean shaven

Afterwards, when I had clapped a pair of artificial whiskers upon Atkinson, the jeweler was inclined to alter his opinion and say positively that it was the man, but on the whole the case was so weak that it never went to trial.

Atkinson was released, and returned to his place "without a stain upon his character," and so justice appeared to be defeated. The first act of the drama had ended with villainy triumphant.

LET ME now bring on "The Wrong Umbrella." A great party was given some months after in a house in the New Town, and, as usual at such gatherings, there was some confusion and accidental misappropriation at the close.

All that happened was easily explained and adjusted but the case of the umbrella. Most of the guests had come in cabs, but one or two living near had come on foot, bringing umbrellas with them.

The number of these could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, yet when the party was over the lady of the house discovered that a fine gold-mounted ivory-handled umbrella of hers had been taken, and a wretched alpaca left in its place.

The missing umbrella was a present, and therefore highly prized; it was also almost fresh from the maker.

It was rather suggestive, too, that the wretched thing left in its place was a gentleman's umbrella— a big clumsy thing which could not have been mistaken for the other by a blind man.

It seemed therefore more like a theft than a mistake, and after fruitless inquiries all round, the lady sent word to us, and a full description of the stolen umbrella was entered in the books.

The theory formed by the owner was that the umbrella had been stolen by some thief who had gained admittance during the confusion, and that the umbrella left in its place had simply been forgotten by come of the guests and had no connection with the removal of her own.

Reasoning upon this ground, I first tried the pawnbrokers without success, and then, remembering that the missing article had been heavily mounted with gold, I thought of trying some of the jewelers to see if they had bought the mounting as old gold.

I had no success on that trial either, but, to my astonishment and delight, M'Sweeny, whom I had sent out to hunt on the same lines in the afternoon, brought in the umbrella, safe and sound as it had been taken from the owner's house.

The surprising thing was that the umbrella had been got in a jeweler's shop, at which it had been left by a gentleman, to get the initials E.H. engraved on the gold top.

It was a mere chance remark which led to its discovery, for when M'Sweeny called the umbrella was away at an engraver's and had to be sent for.

I went over to the New Town very quickly and showed the umbrella to the lady, who identified it— with the exception of the initials— and showed marks and points about the ivory handle which proved it hers beyond doubt.

I kept the umbrella, and went to the jeweler who had undertaken the engraving of the initials. He described the gentleman who had left the umbrella, and, turning up his books, gave me the name and address, which I soon found to be fictitious.

He stated, however, that the umbrella was to be called for on the following day, and I arranged to be there at least an hour before the stated time to receive him.

When I had been there a couple of hours or so— seated in the back-shop, reading the papers— a single stroke at a bell near me, connected with the front shop, told me that my man had come. I advanced and looked through a little pane of glass, carefully concealed from the front, and took a good look at him.

What was my astonishment to find that the "gentleman" was no other than my old acquaintance John Atkinson, the valet!

According to the arrangement I had made with the jeweler— in anticipation of finding the thief to be a man in a good position in society the umbrella was handed over to the caller, the engraving paid for, and the man allowed to leave the shop.

I never followed any one with greater alacrity or a stronger determination not to let him slip. I fully expected him to go to his place in Moray Place, and intended to just let him get comfortably settled there, and then go in and arrest him before his master, who had been very wrathful at the last "insult to his trusted servant."

But John did not turn his face in that direction at all. He moved away out to a quiet street at the South Side, where he stopped before a main door flat bearing the name "Miss Huntley" on a brass plate.

A smart servant girl opened the door, and John was admitted by her with much deference. When he had been in the house a short time, I rang the hell and asked for him.

"He is with Miss Huntley," said the girl with some embarrassment, evidently wishing me to take the hint and leave.

"Indeed? and she is his sweetheart, I suppose." The girl laughed merrily, and said she supposed so.

I only understood that laugh when I saw Miss Huntley— a toothless old woman, old enough to be my mother or John's grandmother. From the girl I learned that her mistress was possessed of considerable property, and that John and she were "soon to be made one."

I doubted that, but did not say so. I had no qualms whatever, and sharply demanded to be shown in. John became ghastly white the moment he sighted my face. Miss Huntley had the stolen umbrella in her hands, and was admiringly examining her initials on the gold top.

"Is that your umbrella, ma'am?" I asked, in a tone which made her blink at me over her spectacles.

"Yes, I've just got it as a present from Mr. Atkinson," she answered.

"Oh, indeed! And did he give you any other presents?" I sternly pursued, as John sank feebly into a chair.

She refused to answer until I should say who I was and what was my business there; but when I did explain matters the poor old skeleton was quite beyond answering me. She was horrified at the discovery that John was a thief, but more so, I am convinced, to find that he was not a gentleman at all, but only a flunkey. In the confusion of her fainting and hysterics I had the opportunity of examining the gold watch, which was taken from her pocket by the servant, and found inside the back of the case a watch-paper bearing Mr. Ward's name and address, and also the written date of the sale, which corresponded exactly with that already in my possession.

The brooch and other articles were readily given up by Miss Huntley, as soon as she was restored to her senses.

Had she been fit for removal we should have taken her too, but the shock had been too much for her, and her medical man positively forbade the arrest.

John made a clean breast of the swindle and impersonation, and went to prison for a year, while the poor old woman he had made love to went to a grave which could scarcely be called early.

I met John some years after in a seedy and broken-down condition, and looking the very opposite of the haughty aristocrat he had seemed when first we met. I scarcely recognized him, but when I did I said, significantly—

"Ah, it's you? I'm afraid, John, you took the wrong umbrella that time."

"I did," he impressively returned, with a rueful shake of the head; and I saw him no more.

______________

13: The Family Bible

TO MEN of business or wealth, accustomed to handle large sums of money, bank-notes for large sums— such as £50 or £100— suggest nothing but convenience of handling and counting.

With those who never owned £50 in their lives it is sometimes very different. The sum represented seems fabulously great— a fortune in itself. And then the thing is so small— a little oblong square of paper— so compressible— so thin— that the second stage— that of temptation—easily follows.

Fifty or a hundred pounds in gold would be a good weight to carry, and a sum difficult to conceal, but a slip of paper! how many cunning and impenetrable places of hiding could be devised in a few minutes for that?

I have to give here the adventures of three £50 bank-notes. These notes had been paid over to Mr. George Lockyer, a builder, who dabbled a little in money-lending, by a friend in quittance of a bond on some property.

The payer of the money was but a working man, else the transaction would probably have been settled with a check; and the fact that this man was in working clothes had an important bearing upon the whole case apart from the absence of a check altogether.

The money had been drawn from the bank, but neither the teller who paid over the notes nor the receiver of them thought of noting the numbers.

Mr. Lockyer, however, though anything but a careful or methodical man in regard to money, chanced to notice the number of the top note, from the fact that it was formed of two twenties, thus— 2020."

The notes were scarcely opened out— they were quickly counted, the necessary papers handed over to the payer, and the whole transaction, and some friendly conversation as well, was all over in about fifteen minutes,  minutes.

When the payer was gone, Mr. Lockyer lifted the lid of his desk, and carelessly placed the notes, folded in three, on the top of some papers, intending to rake them out in a short time, and bank them on his way home to dinner. He did not take them Out or bank them —he forgot all about them. About half an hour later he left the little office, locking the door after him, and taking the key with him.

This little office was part of a small erection attached to the building yard.

That part which Mr. Lockyer used as an office was not above ten feet square. It was fitted up with two desks, as at times the builder employed a clerk, but at that time was entered by no one but himself or any callers he might have to receive while there.

The remainder of the erection was used as a kind of tool-house, and was fitted all round with shelves.

This apartment entered from the building yard, and at one time the door between the two places had been open, but now it was not only closed and locked, but crossed on the tool-house side by the shelves aforesaid.

This door had not been open for years, and the builder had not even a key for the lock. The other door, and that now In use, entered from the street, close to the gate of the yard.

Mr. Lockyer remained away from his office during the whole afternoon, the reason being that he found some friends waiting him, and had no particular press of business to call him away.

Late in the evening, however, he remembered suddenly the three £50 notes left so carelessly in his desk at the office, and started up and whispered to his wife that he would have to go out on business for half-an-hour.

"I have left some money in the place which should have been in the bank or here," was his explanation, "and I must go and get it, for the place is a mere shed," and as the word "money" rouses a wife's strongest instincts he was suffered to depart in peace.

He reached his office in ten minutes, and found it to all appearances exactly as he left it. It was then quite dark, but he was so sure of the spot on which he had placed the three notes that he did not trouble to strike a light, but merely raised the lid of the desk and groped for the notes.

His fingers did not touch the soft, greasy papers, but the harder and smoother pile of accounts which had been beneath them.

He groped and groped in vain; he struck a light— first only a match, then the gas— but in vain. The three bank notes were gone.

"Did I leave them here? Did I not put them in my pocket?" was his first wild thought, followed by a hurried groping and searching for his pocketbook.

The notes were not there. Then he distinctly remembered placing them in the desk, and the fact that he had never removed them.

He searched the whole desk, turned out every scrap of paper and article that it contained, carefully examined the room from floor to ceiling, turned over everything in the other desk, and finally sat down with his hands in his pockets, thoroughly beaten and puzzled.

He had locked the notes in that small apartment; the key had never been out of his pocket, yet, on returning a few hours later, he found that they had vanished.

The builder glared about him in a state of great excitement, imprecating under his breath, and heartily abusing himself for his carelessness, though he had done the same often before with impunity.

While he sat thus vainly seeking a solution his eye fell upon the disused door. There was no key to it that he knew of, and the outer door of the tool-house, entering from the yard, he felt sure was locked.

Still there was a possibility of entrance in that direction, and the fact set the builder thinking. But one man had the entry of that tool-house— a disabled mason, named John Morley, whom out of charity he kept employed about the yard.

Morley had injured himself permanently by lifting a heavy weight, and could do little but look after the things in the yard, and give them as they were wanted by the men. Mr. Lockyer had known him nearly all his life, and never found him to do a dishonest action.

Yet still the fact remained that there was a man, very poorly paid— his wage was 12s a week— having a wife and two bairns to keep, and with a possible means of access to the missing money.

Might the money not have been taken in a moment of strong temptation even by a man reputed sterling and honest like John Morley?

"If he has taken it, I can hardly blame him," was the generous reflection of the builder. "They have a sair struggle to make ends meet, I've no doubt; and I was a fool to leave the money lying about. But I never knew him to have a key for that door, and how could he possibly know that the money was there, even if he had a key? I had better act cautiously, as much for my own sake as for his and his family's. I must say nothing to the police or any one till I see John himself."

The builder, therefore, could scarcely believe that the man he had so helped and shielded could return the kindness by robbing him of £150; and he locked up his office and turned in the direction of the yard-keeper's home, resolved to be as guarded in his words as possible, so as not to hurt the man's feelings.

Morley's home was a cellar in Buccleuch street—a dingy, damp hovel, lighted by a grating under a shop window.

The place was not far from the yard, and therefore, was speedily reached by the builder.

Morley was at home smoking by the fire, and the bairns were playing in a corner. The wife was out washing, as she often was, in order to eke out their income.

Morley looked a good deal surprised at the visit, and scarcely asked his employer to enter.

Mr. Lockyer, however, walked in, and seated himself, and, after a few preliminary words, said abruptly—

"John, was there anybody about the yard this afternoon?"

How Morley looked it was impossible to say, for the light was only that of the fire, and his back was towards it.

" No, sir," he answered very readily.

"Nor in the tool-house?" continued his employer.

"No; it's been lockit a' day," said Morley decidedly.

"You're sure?"

"Quite sure, sir."

There was an awkward pause, and then Morley, with a slight tremor in his tones, said—

"Is there onything wrong?"

"Yes; I left three notes— bank-notes for £50— in my desk when I went away to dinner, and they were gone when I got back half an hour ago."

"Impossible!" The man looked shocked and astonished, but there was nevertheless a something constrained or unusual in has manner that the builder did not like. "Naebody could get into the office by the tool-house," Morley hastened to add, "that door hasna been opened for years, and the key's lost. Besides, there's the shelves in the road."

"How could they get in then ?" cried Mr. Lockyer. "The front door was locked, and the key in my pocket; and it's not likely that they would pick the lock in broad daylight in the front street."

"Oh, thieves are clever now-a-days," observed Morley. "'They're fit for onything."

"They may be, but that's a little beyond the ordinary," drily returned his master. "How were they to know I had left the money in my desk, or how long I would be away?"

"Ah, that's it!" said Morley.

"Do you know nothing about it?" said Mr. Lockyer at last, with an effort.

"Me? Do you think I'm a thief?" said Morley, flushing up. "If you do, you're welcome to search the house now?"

"Oh, I daresay!" sneeringly returned his master, liking his yard-keeper's manners less than ever. "It would be easy finding three notes, wouldn't it, if you liked to hide them well? I might as well look for a needle in a haystack. No, no, Morley, I don't say you took them, or that you didn't, but they're to be found, and I'll leave that to the men that are bred to the trade— the police or the detectives."

"Yes, they're the best hands at that," said Morley, feebly.

No strong and indignant protestations of innocence; no hot words, or tears, or reproaches; nothing but that meaningless answer, and that look of guilt and fear.

"The man's a thief, if looks are to be trusted," thought the builder. "If it turns out so, I'll never be kind to mortal being again."

Mr. Lockyer had done a foolish thing; he had let the man know he was suspected; but in the action he had been prompted by the best of intentions.

He had failed in these, and he now did the next best thing to redeem the mistake— he came to us with news of the robbery.

He described the circumstances of the robbery and the position of the place much as I have put them down, and concluded by stating it to be his firm belief that Morley was either himself the thief, or knew how the clever robbery had been accomplished.

I agreed with him, but blamed him strongly for going near the suspected man.

"It is the money you are most anxious to recover, and yet you go and put the man on his guard. You may make up your mind now that you will never see the notes again. They will either go into the fire, or be put away in some hiding-place far beyond our power to lay bare."

"That's nice comfort to a fellow," observed the builder ruefully. "Is there anything you can do at all?"

"Oh, yes; we can do our best to make up for your blunder, by hunting for both the thief and the notes; but I have told you what is most likely to be the result."

I had no expectation of making anything by a search in Morley's house, but I thought it advisable that the form should be gone through, if only that I might study the man's face the while. I could have gone and done it there and then, but deemed it best to wait till morning.

Morley appeared as usual at the yard before six o'clock, and made no allusion to the interview of the night before beyond asking his master, when he appeared about eighth o'clock, he had got any word of the missing money?"

He got a very curt and ungracious answer, and spoke no more.

At the breakfast hour, when Morley locked up the yard and went home, I was waiting near the spot with assistants skilled in searching.

We just allowed John to enter his house and get comfortably sealed at his porridge, when we knocked and were admitted. He did not seem greatly disturbed when I gave my name and showed the search warrant.

"You didna need a warrant to search my house," he said boldly. "I tellt the mister that he was welcome to search it whenever he liked."

Morley's wife seemed much more distressed at the charge than he, and assisted us with the greatest eagerness and anxious concern.

We found no trace of the notes, and Morley's manner convinced me that they were not in the house.

He was too cool and careless. Had they been hidden there— however securely or effectively— he could not have concealed some perturbation when we came near the spot or grew "hot" in our little game of "hide and seek."

Just once did I notice anything like a change in his expression of face. When we had turned over everything in the house I chanced to say to Mrs. Morley—

"These are all the things you have, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes, sir," she earnestly answered. "Since John rackit himsel' we've had to make shift with less and less."

While she thus spoke, I saw her eve run round the room as if in search of something; then she began poking about with the aid of one of our lanterns, and finally she turned to her husband and said, in a kind of whisper— "Where's the famil—"

She did not get the sentence finished, nor even enough of it to be intelligible to me.

Morley was standing close to her, and whether he kicked her on the leg, or trod on her toe, or merely gave her a look, I cannot tell, but he checked her speech most suddenly and effectually.

I just saw enough and heard enough to make me suspicious, for the den was dark, and I was not expecting the words so unguardedly uttered by the wife.

The last word sounded to me like "fummel," and I racked my brains for many an hour after to discover what on earth a "fummel" was.

I had no doubt at all now of Morley's guilt, and, of course, I could have arrested him, but what good would that have done?

There was no evidence whatever to support the charge, and likely to be none with Morely locked up in prison. Besides, I now felt tolerably certain that the notes were not destroyed, but concealed in the "fummel"— whatever that meant.

I wanted badly to find that "fummel"— and reasoned that I was more likely to do so with Morley moving about in freedom than with him cooped up in prison.

The secret of the hiding-place was known to Morley alone; that was quite evident to me from the eagerness of the wife to assist me, and help to prove her husband's innocence, and also the simplicity with which she had let out the remark about the "fummel."

I determined to draw off my men, with so many apologies that Morley should think himself quite safe from further trouble or suspicion.

To confirm this impression, I directed his master to take no further notice of the matter, and to keep him in his employment as usual, which was done.

I now had Morley carefully watched during the hours he was free from his work.

I changed the men occasionally, and never watched him myself, that he might not take alarm, but nothing came of the watching.

At length I grew impatient, and took to relieving the men watching him after dark, as then there was little chance of him recognizing me.

Morley generally took a solitary stroll after partaking of his frugal supper, and on one of these occasions he stopped before a broker's in the Potter Row, a place suspected to be a kind of "Wee Pawn"— that is, an unlicensed pawnbroker's.

Morley looked in at the window first, then all around him, and then walked into the shop and was soon engaged in a violent altercation with the boy in charge.

The stormed, and he threatened, and he swore, and I could see his arms moving about more energetically than those of a preacher "dingin' the poopit cushion a' to bits," but I was afraid to venture near enough to hear the words and understand their meaning.

At length he left the shop in a furious and excited state, volubly threatening to "send the police" to them.

I was strongly tempted to offer my services, but, being curious to learn the cause of the dispute, I allowed the blustering man to depart, and then entered the shop.

The boy was a smart young shaver named Tim Cordiner, and knew me perfectly.

"What did Morley kick up such a row about?" I asked.

Tim put on an air of simplicity and said: "Who's Morley?"

"That man who was here just now."

"His name isn't Morley— it's Peter Mackintosh," said Tim with an air of superior knowledge.

"Oh, is it? I beg your pardon," I returned with a fine-drawn sneer, which Tim perfectly appreciated, "Well, what was he in such a state about?"

"He's in a state about something which he sold to my father, and wants now to buy back again. He says the agreement was that it was to be kept a month to give him a chance to buy it back. Did you ever hear the like? We're not allowed to do  that," the monkey solemnly added; it would be as bad as keeping a 'wee pawn.' "

"Oh, come now, Tim, don't try that with me; play the daft laddie with somebody else," I laughingly returned. "What was the article he sold or left with you?"

"A Bible— a Family Bible—"

"Good gracious!"

"Ay, you may say that. Bibles are a drug in the market; and to expect us to keep one when we had a chance to sell it! Family Bibles is out of fashion now— can't get the price of the binding for them— and the last we had lay for a year in the windy."

"And so you sold this one?" I said quietly, having got time to think during Tim's speech. "Who was the buyer, a revivalist?"

"Yes, that's why that man kicked up the row. He says my father knew it wasn't to be sold. I wasn't to know that, and I was glad to get rid of it. The "revival" was near not taking it, because the Family Register was cutout— tried to beat me down two shillings for that. Religious folks are always the biggest screws."

"You must be terribly religious then," I calmly remarked to Tim, for I knew that that youthful precocity could drive a bargain which would have drawn a blush to the cheeks of the biggest rogue of a broker who ever bartered and sold.

Tim grinned delightedly at the tribute to his genius.

"Would you know the 'revival' again?" I asked, beginning to think I was fairly done at last.

"Oh, fine. I've seen him before, giving away tracts on the streets. He left me one, after buying the Bible and trying to beat me down two shillings."

"Have you got it now?"

"No; I used it to light the gas— it saved a match, you know."

After some further conversation I warned him to say nothing to Morley of my visit, should that worthy return, as I had no doubt he would, to see Tim's father.

After the visit to Tim the suspected yard-keeper seemed a good deal depressed. He went back once, and had a hot quarrel with Tim's father, threatening the police again, but failing to fulfil that threat.

He said the Bible must be got, and the broker promised to do his best— which meant nothing.

In the meantime I had been much occupied in thought about Tim himself. His answers to me had appeared frank and truthful enough, but a dire suspicion that it was possible for the monkey to cheat and deceive even me crept into my mind.

Could it be possible that Tim was himself the purchaser of the Family Bible, and the 'revival' merely a creation of his vivid imagination?"

So strong a hold did this idea take of my mind that I gave up watching Morley and turned my undivided attention to Tim.

I could not find that he had changed a £50 bank-note, but I did discover that he had been seen with two twenties.

I, therefore, only waited till he should be out with his friends for a day's squandering, and then I pounced on him in the midst of his jollity.

Tim appeared mightily crestfallen, but grandly demanded to know what was the charge against him.

I replied by asking where he got all the money he had been spending. His reply staggered me a little.

"What? is it my father who has set you on to this?"

Now, why should Tim blurt out that? To me it implied that Tim had taken the money from his father.

I threw out a hint about a Family Bible being a good bank to draw from.

Tim looked puzzled, and really did not seem to grasp the idea. I did not enlighten him with an explanation, but I myself was enlightened next day by his father, who had discovered that his smart son had broken in on a hoard of his own, and lessened it by nearly £60.

He nevertheless did not wish to charge Tim with the robbery, but merely requested that that clever monkey might be handed over to him for punishment.

I could not oblige him, though he promised that the chastisement should bring Tim as near the grave as he would ever be without entering it.

I had now to put the matter before Tim in a plain, straightforward question—''Had he or bad he not lied about the sale of the Family Bible?"

He loudly protested his truthfulness, and offered to help me to find the buyer.

"How can you do that when you say he left neither name nor address?" I impatiently returned.

"Oh, we could easily find him at some of the revival meetings," was Tim's quick-witted reply. "He'll be at the door giving out tracts when the meeting breaks up. I know his face fine."

I stared at Tim, and then spoke out the thought that flashed across my mind. "Tim, if you don't turn out a thief, you'll maybe be a detective some day."

"A detective?" he echoed, with a merry twinkle in his eyes. "Oh, no, Mr. M'Govan, I haven't enough wickedness in me for that."

Tim and I went to a revival meeting that night together.

By together I mean not so much that we went in company, as that we were attached to each other— by a pair of handcuffs.

Tim could not have gone forward to the penitent form though he had been ever so strongly inclined.

We did not need to wait till the close, nor look out for a tract distributor, for one of those who rose to address the meeting was instantly identified by Tim as the buyer of the Family Bible.

The lad was quite young, and had on his face as he spoke a look of ethereal happiness and rapt delight which could never have been assumed,

I think I see that fair face before me now. It looked noble, exalted, thrilling— just such a face as we could imagine smiling at the stake, and breathing forth forgiveness and peace from the midst of the roaring flames.

When the address was over the young man had occasion to move through the hall and past the place where we sat.

I touched him on the arm, and drew him out to the door. He promptly admitted that he had bought a Family Bible, second-hand, from the boy before him.

He had it at home, but though he had used it twice every day in his home, he declared most earnestly that he had found nothing in it.

At my suggestion we walked with him to his home. He was evidently unmarried, for the home was presided over by his mother, a quiet, respectable-looking widow.

The Family Bible I sought occupied a place of honor in the little home, and the owner had only to point to it and tell me to take it down with my own hands.

I opened the book, and he quietly informed me that the only alteration I should find would be at the beginning, where he had inserted a new leaf as a Family Register.

I turned to the leaf and read there his own name and quite a recent date, in the column of "Births," with the words below, "saved from wrath by the mercy of Jesus Christ." Without a remark I sat down and turned over every single leaf in that book, but found nothing.

When I had finished, and was in despair, I happened to notice that the paper pasted against the inside of the back board did not correspond in color and texture with that on the front board.

A little examination revealed the cause. The lining of the back board was simply one of the fly-leaves pasted down at the edges. I passed my fingers over the pasted leaf.

There was a feeling of somewhat below. I took out my penknife and ran the point into the sheet and round the pasted edge—the whole family, and Tim in particular, looking on with goggling eyes.

When I turned back the leaf I found it glazed and yellow on the under side, like that inside the front board, but I found also other three slips of paper neatly ranged above one another, flat against the board of the Bible— three £50 bank-notes.

The owner of the Bible looked simply and truly surprised; Tim looked terribly disappointed and chagrined.

"If I had known they were there I'd never have sold it so cheap," he blurted out.

"Maybe not at all?" I suggested; and Tim did not deny the soft impeachment.

The notes were readily identified by the builder, by the number "2020" which one of them bore; but when we came to look for Morley he had vanished.

From another country he afterwards sent a detailed confession of the circumstances which led to the crime.

The payer of the money was dressed as a working man, and asked at the gate for Mr. Lockyer.

Morley at once conceived a suspicion that the man had come after the post of yard-keeper, and applied his eyes and ears to the door in the tool-house to ascertain the truth.

He saw the notes placed in the desk, and the temptation followed, for he had found a key shortly before in the tool-house which fitted the lock perfectly.

After taking the notes he dropped the key into a street "cypher," or we might have stumbled on it during our search. Tim was set free, but he has not yet developed to a detective.

End