Book + 

IV + 

Napoleon the Great + 

I + 

The Boy from Slopperton + 

Eight years have passed since the trial of Richard Marwood. How have those eight years been spent by “Daredevil Dick?” + 

In a small room a few feet square, in the County Lunatic Asylum, fourteen miles from the town of Slopperton, with no human being’s companionship but that of a grumpy old deaf keeper, and a boy, his assistant⁠—for eight monotonous years this man’s existence has crept slowly on; always the same: the same food, the same hours at which that food must be eaten, the same rules and regulations for every action of his inactive life. Think of this, and pity the man surnamed “Daredevil Dick,” and once the maddest and merriest creature in a mad and merry circle. Think of the daily walk in a great square flagged yard⁠—the solitary walk, for he is not allowed even the fellowship of the other lunatics, lest the madness which led him to commit an awful crime should again break out, and endanger the lives of those about him. During eight long years he has counted every stone in the flooring, every flaw and every crack in each of those stones. He knows the shape of every shadow that falls upon the whitewashed wall, and can, at all seasons of the year, tell the hour by the falling of it. He knows that at such a time on a summer’s evening the shadows of the iron bars of the window will make long black lines across the ground, and mount and mount, dividing the wall as if it were in panels, till they meet, and absorbing altogether the declining light, surround and absorb him too, till he is once more alone in the darkness. He knows, too, that at such a time on the grey winter’s morning these same shadows will be the first indications of the coming light; that, from the thick gloom of the dead night they will break out upon the wall, with strips of glimmering day between, only enough like light to show the blackness of the shade. He has sometimes been mad enough and wretched enough to pray that these shadows might fall differently, that the very order of nature might be reversed, to break this bitter and deadly monotony. He has sometimes prayed that, looking up, he might see a great fire in the sky, and know that the world was at an end. How often he has prayed to die, it would be difficult to say. At one time it was his only prayer; at one time he did not pray at all. He has been permitted at intervals to see his mother; but her visits, though he has counted the days, hours, and even minutes between them, have only left him more despondent than ever. She brings so much with her into his lonely prison, so much memory of a joyous past, of freedom, of a happy home, whose happiness he did his best in his wild youth to destroy; the memory, too, of that careless youth, its boon companions, its devoted friends. She brings so much of all this back to him by the mere fact of her presence, that she leaves behind her the blackness of a despair far more terrible than the most terrible death. She represents to him the outer world; for she is the only creature belonging to it who ever crosses the threshold of his prison. The asylum chaplain, the asylum doctor, the keepers and the officials belonging to the asylum⁠—all these are part and parcel of this great prison-house of stone, brick, and mortar, and seem to be about as capable of feeling for him, listening to him, or understanding him, as the stones, bricks, and mortar themselves. Routine is the ruler of this great prison; and if this wretched insane criminal cannot live by rules and regulations, he must die according to them, and be buried by them, and so be done with, out of the way; and his little room, No. 35, will be ready for someone else, as wicked, as dangerous, and as unfortunate as he. + 

During the earlier part of his imprisonment the idea had pervaded the asylum that as he had been found guilty of committing one murder, he might, very likely, find it necessary to his peculiar state of mind to commit more murders, and would probably find it soothing to his feelings to assassinate anybody who might come in his way any morning before breakfast. The watch kept upon him was therefore for some time very strict. He was rather popular at first in the asylum, as a distinguished public character; and the keepers, though a little shy of attending upon him in their proper persons, were extremely fond of peering in at him through a little oval opening in the upper panel of the door of his cell. They also brought such visitors as came to improve their minds by going over the hospital for the insane to have a special and private view of this maniacal murderer; and they generally received an extra donation from the sightseers thus gratified. Even the lunatics themselves were interested in the supposed assassin. A gentleman, who claimed to be the Emperor of the German Ocean and the Chelsea Waterworks, was very anxious to see him, as he had received a despatch from his minister of police informing him that Richard Marwood had red hair, and he particularly wished to confirm this intelligence, or to give the minister his congé. + 

Another highly-respectable person, whose case was before the House of Commons, and who took minutes of it every day on a slate, with a bit of slate pencil which he wore attached to his buttonhole by a string, and which also served him as a toothpick⁠—the slate being entrusted to a keeper who forwarded it to the electric telegraph, to be laid on the table of the House, and brought home, washed clean, in half an hour, which was always done to the minute;⁠—this gentleman also sighed for an introduction to poor Dick, for Maria Martin had come to him in a vision all the way from the Red Barn, to tell him that the prisoner was his first cousin, through the marriage of his uncle with the third daughter of Henry the Eighth’s seventh wife; and he considered it only natural and proper that such near relations should become intimately acquainted with each other. + 

A lady, who pronounced herself to be the only child of the Pope of Rome, by a secret union with a highly-respectable youngperson, heiress to a gentleman connected with the muffin trade somewhere about Drury Lane, fell in love offhand with Richard, from description alone; and begged one of the keepers to let him know that she had a clue to a subterranean passage, which led straight from the asylum to a baker’s shop in Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, a distance of some two hundred and fifty miles, and had been originally constructed by William the Conqueror for the convenience of his visits to Fair Rosamond when the weather was bad. The lady begged her messenger to inform Mr. Marwood that if he liked to unite his fortune with hers, they could escape by this passage, and set up in the muffin business⁠—unless, indeed, his Holiness of the triple crown invited them over to the Vatican, which perhaps, under existing circumstances, was hardly likely. + 

But though a wonder, which elsewhere would only last nine days, may in the dreary monotony of such a place as this, endure for more than nine weeks, it must still die out at last. So at last Richard was forgotten by everyone except his heartbroken mother, and the keeper and boy attending upon him. + 

His peculiar hallucination being his fancy that he was the Emperor Napoleon the First, was, of course, little wonder in a place where every wretched creature fancied himself someone or something which he was not; where men and women walked about in long disjointed dreams, which had no waking but in death; where once bright and gifted human beings found a wild and imbecile happiness in crowns of straw, and decorations of paper and rags; which was more sad to see than the worst misery a consciousness of their state might have brought them. At first, Richard had talked wildly of his fancied greatness, had called his little room the rock of St. Helena, and his keeper, Sir Hudson Lowe. But he grew quieter day by day, and at last never spoke at all, except in answer to a question. And so on, for eight long years. + 

In the autumn of the eighth year he fell ill. A strange illness. Perhaps scarcely to be called an illness. Rather a dying out of the last light of hope, and an utter abandonment of himself to despair. Yes, that was the name of the disease under which the high and bold spirit of Daredevil Dick sank at last. Despair. A curious disease. Not to be cured by rules and regulations, however salutary those rules might be; not to be cured even by the Board, which was supposed to be in a manner omnipotent, and to be able to cure anything in one sitting; not to be cured certainly by the asylum doctor, who found Richard’s case very difficult to deal with⁠—more especially difficult since there was no positive physical malady to attack. There was a physical malady, because the patient grew every day weaker, lost appetite, and was compelled to take to his bed; but it was the malady of the mind acting on the body, and the cure of the last could only be effected by the cure of the first. + 

So Richard lay upon his narrow little couch, watching the shadows on the bare wall, and the clouds that passed across the patch of sky which he could see through the barred window opposite his bed, through long sunny days, and moonlight nights, throughout the month of September. + 

Thus it happened that one dull afternoon, on looking up, he saw a darker cloud than usual hurry by; and in its train another, darker still; then a black troop of ragged followers; and then such a shower of rain came down, as he could not remember having seen throughout the time of his captivity. But this heavy shower was only the beginning of three weeks’ rainy weather; at the end of which time the country round was flooded in every direction, and Richard heard his keeper tell another man that the river outside the prison, which usually ran within twenty feet of the wall on one side of the great yard, was now swollen to such a degree as to wash the stonework of this wall for a considerable height. + 

The day Richard heard this he heard another dialogue, which took place in the passage outside his room. He was lying on his bed, thinking of the bitterness of his fate, as he had thought so many hundred times, through so many hundred days, till he had become, as it were, the slave of a dreadful habit of his mind, and was obliged to go over the same ground forever and ever, whether he would or no⁠—he was lying thus, when he heard his keeper say⁠— + 

“To think as how the discontented little beast should take and go and better hisself at such a time as this here, when there ain’t a boy to be had for love or money⁠—which three shillings a week is all the Board will give⁠—as will come here to take care of him.” + 

Richard knew himself to be the “him” alluded to. The doctor had ordered the boy to sit up with him at night during the latter part of his illness, and it had been something of a relief to him, in the blank monotony of his life, to watch this boy’s attempts to keep awake, and his furtive games at marbles under the bed when he thought Richard was not looking, or to listen to his snoring when he slept. + 

“You see, boys as is as bold as brass many ways⁠—as would run under ’osses’ heads, and like it; as thinks it fun to run across the railroad when there’s a hexpress hengine a comin’, and as will amuse theirselves for the hour together with twopen’orth of gunpowder and a lighted candle⁠—still feels timersome about sittin’ up alone of nights with him,” said the keeper. + 

“But he’s harmless enough, ain’t he?” asked the other. + 

“Harmless! Lord bless his poor hinnercent ’art! there ain’t no more harm in him nor a baby. But it’s no use a sayin’ that, for there ain’t a boy far or near what’ll come and help to take care of him.” + 

A minute or two after this, the keeper came into Richard’s room with the regulation basin of broth⁠—a panacea, as it was supposed, for all ills, from water on the brain to rheumatism. As he put the basin down, and was about to go, Richard spoke to him⁠— + 

“The boy is going, then?” + 

“Yes, sir.” The keeper treated him with great respect, for he had been handsomely fed by Mrs. Marwood on every visit throughout the eight years of her son’s imprisonment. “Yes, he’s a-goin’, sir. The place ain’t lively enough for him, if you please. I’d lively him, if I was the Board! Ain’t he had the run of the passages, and half an hour every night to enjoy hisself in the yard! He’s a goin’ into a doctor’s service. He says it’ll be jolly, carrying out medicine for other people to take, and gloating over the thought of ’em a-taking it.” + 

“And you can’t get another boy to come here?” + 

“Well, you see, sir, the boys about here don’t seem to take kindly to the place. So I’ve got orders from the Board to put an advertisement in one of the Slopperton papers; and I’m a-goin’ to do it this afternoon. So you’ll have a change in your attendance, maybe, sir, before the week’s out.” + 

Nothing could better prove the utter dreariness and desolation of Richard’s life than that such a thing as the probable arrival of a strange boy to wait upon him seemed an event of importance. He could not help, though he despised himself for his folly, speculating upon the possible appearance of the new boy. Would he be big or little, stout or thin? What would be the colour of his eyes and hair? Would his voice be gruff or squeaky; or would it be that peculiar and uncertain voice, common to overgrown boys, which is gruff one minute and squeaky the next, and always is in one of these extremes when you most expect it to be in the other? + 

But these speculations were of course a part of his madness; for it is not to be supposed that a long course of solitary confinement could produce any dreadful change in the mind of a sane man; or surely no human justices or lawgivers would ever adjudge so terrible a punishment to any creature, human as themselves, and no more liable to error than themselves. + 

So Richard, lying on his little bed through the long rainy days, awaits the departure of his old attendant and the coming of a new one; and in the twilight of the third day he still lies looking up at the square grated window, and counting the drops falling from the eaves⁠—for there is at last some cessation in the violence of the rain. He knows it is an autumn evening; but he has not seen the golden red of one fallen leaf, or the subdued colouring of one autumnal flower: he knows it is the end of September, because his keeper has told him so; and when his window is open, he can hear sometimes, far away, deadened by the rainy atmosphere as well as by the distance, the occasional report of some sportsman’s gun. He thinks, as he hears this, of a September many years ago, when he and a scapegrace companion took a fortnight’s shooting in a country where to brush against a bush, or to tread upon the long grass, was to send a feathered creature whirring up in the clear air. He remembers the merry pedestrian journey, the roadside inns, the pretty barmaids, the joint purse; the blue smoke from two short meerschaum pipes curling up to the grey morning sky; the merry laughter from two happy hearts ringing out upon the chill morning air. He remembers encounters with savage gamekeepers, of such ferocious principle and tender consciences as even the administration of a half-crown could not lull to sleep; he remembers jovial evenings in the great kitchens of old inns, where unknown quantities of good old ale were drunk, and comic songs were sung, with such a chorus, that to join in it was to be overcome by such fatigue, or to be reduced from wildest mirth to such a pitch of sudden melancholy, as ultimately to lead to the finishing of the evening in tears, or else under the table. He remembers all these things, and he wonders⁠—as, being a madman, it is natural he should⁠—wonders whether it can be indeed himself, who once was that wittiest, handsomest, most generous, and best of fellows, baptised long ago in a river of sparkling hock, moselle, and burgundy, “Daredevil Dick.” + 

But something more than these sad memories comes with the deepening twilight, for presently Richard hears the door of his room unlocked, and his keeper’s voice, saying⁠— + 

“There, go in, and tell the gent you’ve come. I’m a-comin’ in with his supper and his lamp presently, and then I’ll tell you what you’ve got to do.” + 

Naturally Richard looked round in the direction of the door, for he knew this must be the strange boy. Now, his late juvenile attendant had numbered some fifteen summers; to say nothing of the same number of winters, duly chronicled by chilblains and chapped hands. Richard’s eyes therefore looked towards the open door at about that height from the ground which a lad of fifteen has commonly attained; and looking thus, Richard saw nothing. He therefore lowered his glance, and in about the neighbourhood of what would have been the lowest button of his last attendant’s waistcoat, he beheld the small pale thin face of a very small and very thin boy. + 

This small boy was standing rubbing his right little foot against his left little wizen leg, and looking intently at Richard. To say that his tiny face had a great deal of character in it would not be to say much; what face he had was all character. + 

Determination, concentration, energy, strength of will, and brightness of intellect, were all written in unmistakable lines upon that pale pinched face. The boy’s features were wonderfully regular, and had nothing in common with the ordinary features of a boy of his age and his class; the tiny nose was a perfect aquiline; the decided mouth might have belonged to a prime minister with the blood of the Plantagenets in his veins. The eyes, of a bluish grey, were small, and a little too near together, but the light in them was the light of an intelligence marvellous in one so young. + 

Richard, though a wild and reckless fellow, had never been devoid of thought, and in the good days past had dabbled in many a science, and had adopted and abandoned many a creed. He was something of a physiognomist, and he read enough in one glance at this boy’s face to awaken both surprise and interest in him. + 

“So,” said he, “you are the new boy! Sit down,” he pointed to a little wooden stool near the bed as he spoke. “Sit down, and make yourself at home.” + 

The boy obeyed, and seated himself firmly by the side of Richard’s pillow; but the stool was so low, and he was so small, that Richard had to change his position to look over the edge of the bed at his new attendant. While Daredevil Dick contemplated him the boy’s small grey eyes peered round the four whitewashed walls, and then fixed themselves upon the barred window with such a look of concentration, that it seemed to Richard as if the little lad must be calculating the thickness and power of resistance of each iron bar with the accuracy of a mathematician. + 

“What’s your name, my lad?” asked Richard. He had been always beloved by all his inferiors for a manner combining the stately reserve of a great king with the friendly condescension of a popular prince. + 

“Slosh, sir,” answered the boy, bringing his grey eyes with a great effort away from the iron bars and back to Richard. + 

“Slosh! A curious name. Your surname, I suppose?” + 

“Surname and christen name too, sir. Slosh⁠—short for Sloshy.” + 

“But have you no surname, then?” + 

“No, sir; fondling, sir.” + 

“A foundling: dear me, and you are called Sloshy! Why, that is the name of the river that runs through Slopperton.” + 

“Yes, sir, which I was found in the mud of the river, sir, when I was only three months old, sir.” + 

“Found in the river⁠—were you? Poor boy⁠—and by whom?” + 

“By the gent what adopted me, sir.” + 

“And he is⁠—?” asked Richard. + 

“A gent connected with the police force, sir; detective⁠—” + 

This one word worked a sudden change in Richard’s manner. He raised himself on his elbow, looked intently at the boy, and asked, eagerly⁠— + 

“This detective, what is his name? But no,” he muttered, “I did not even know the name of that man. Stay⁠—tell me, you know perhaps some of the men in the Slopperton police force besides your adopted father?” + 

“I knows every man jack of ’em, sir; and a fine staff they is⁠—a credit to their country and a happiness to theirselves.” + 

“Do you happen to know amongst them a dumb man?” asked Richard. + 

“Lor’, sir, that’s him.” + 

“Who?” + 

“Father, sir. The gent what found me and adopted me. I’ve got a message for you, sir, from father, and I was a-goin’ to give it you, only I thought I’d look about me a little first; but stay⁠—Oh, dear, the gentleman’s took and fainted. Here,” he said, running to the door and calling out in a shrill voice, “come and unlock this here place, will yer, and look alive with that lamp! The gentleman’s gone off into a dead faint, and there ain’t so much as a drop of water to chuck over his face.” + 

The prisoner had indeed fallen back insensible on the bed. For eight long years he had nourished in his heart a glimmering though dying hope that he might one day receive some token of remembrance from the man who had taken a strange part in the eventful crisis of his life. This ray of light had lately died out, along with every other ray which had once illuminated his dreary life; but in the very moment when hope was abandoned, the token once eagerly looked for came upon him so suddenly, that the shock was too much for his shattered mind and feeble frame. + 

When Richard recovered from his swoon, he found himself alone with the boy from Slopperton. He was a little startled by the position of that young person, who had seated himself upon the small square deal table by the bedside, commanding from this elevation a full view of Richard’s face, whereon his two small grey eyes were intently fixed, with that same odd look of concentration with which he had regarded the iron bars. + 

“Come now,” said he, with the consolatory tone of an experienced sick-nurse; “come now, we mustn’t give way like this, just because we hears from our friends; because, you see, if we does, our friends can’t be no good to us whichever way their intention may be.” + 

“You said you had a message for me,” said Richard, in feeble but anxious tones. + 

“Well, it ain’t a long un, and here it is,” answered the young gentleman from his extempore pulpit; and then he continued, with very much the air of giving out a text⁠—“Keep up your pecker.” + 

“Keep up what?” muttered Richard. + 

“Your pecker. ‘Keep up your pecker,’ them’s his words; and as he never yet vos known to make a dirty dinner off his own syllables, it ain’t likely as he’ll take and eat ’em. He says to me⁠—on his fingers, in course⁠—‘Tell the gent to keep up his pecker, and leave all the rest to you; for you’re a pocket edition of all the sharpness as ever knives was nothing to, or else say I’ve brought you up for no good whatsomedever.’ ” + 

This was rather a vague speech; so perhaps it is scarcely strange that Richard did not derive much immediate comfort from it. But, in spite of himself, he did derive a great deal of comfort from the presence of this boy, though he almost despised himself for attaching the least importance to the words of an urchin of little better than eight years of age. Certainly this urchin of eight had a shrewdness of manner which would have been almost remarkable in a man of the world of fifty, and Richard could scarcely help fancying that he must have graduated in some other hemisphere, and been thrown, small as to size, but full grown as to acuteness, into this; or it seemed as if some great strong man had been reduced into the compass of a little boy, in order to make him sharper, as cooks boil down a gallon of gravy to a pint in the manufacture of strong soup. + 

But, however the boy came to be what he was, there he was, holding forth from his pulpit, and handing Richard the regulation basin of broth which composed his supper. + 

“Now, what you’ve got to do,” said he, “is to get well; for until you are well, and strong too, there ain’t the least probability of your bein’ able to change your apartments, if you should feel so inclined, which perhaps ain’t likely.” + 

Richard looked at the diminutive speaker with a wonderment he could not repress. + 

“Starin’ won’t cure you,” said his juvenile attendant, with friendly disrespect, “not if you took the pattern of my face till you could draw it in the dark. The best thing you can do is to eat your supper, and tomorrow we must try what we can do for you in the way of port wine; for if you ain’t strong and well afore that ere river outside this ere vall goes down, it’s a chance but vot it’ll be a long time afore you sees the outside of the val in question.” + 

Richard caught hold of the boy’s small arm with a grasp which, in spite of his weakness, had a convulsive energy that nearly toppled his youthful attendant from his elevation. + 

“You never can think of anything so wild?” he said, in a tumult of agitation. + 

“Lor’ bless yer ’art, no,” said the boy; “we never thinks of anything vot’s wild⁠—our ’abits is businesslike; but vot you’ve got to do is to go to sleep, and not to worrit yourself; and as I said before, I say again, when you’re well and strong we’ll think about changin’ these apartments. We can make excuse that the lookout was too lively, or that the colour of the whitewash was a-hinjurin’ our eyesight.” + 

For the first time for many nights Richard slept well; and opening his eyes the next morning, his first anxiety was to convince himself that the arrival of the boy from Slopperton was not some foolish dream engendered in his disordered brain. No, there the boy sat: whether he had been to sleep on the table, or whether he had never taken his eyes off Richard the whole night, there he was, with those eyes fixed, exactly as they had been the night before, on the prisoner’s face. + 

“Why, I declare we’re all the better for our good night’s rest,” he said, rubbing his hands, as he contemplated Richard; “and we’re ready for our breakfast as soon as ever we can get it, which will be soon, judging by our keeper’s hobnailed boots as is a-comin’ down the passage with a tray in his hand.” + 

This rather confused statement was confirmed by a noise in the stone corridor without, which sounded as if a pair of stout working men’s bluchers were walking in company with a basin and a teaspoon. + 

“Hush!” said the boy, holding up a warning forefinger, “keep it dark!” Richard did not exactly know what he was to keep dark; but as he had, without one effort at resistance, surrendered himself, mentally and physically, to the direction of his small attendant, he lay perfectly still, and did not utter a word. + 

In obedience to this youthful director, he also took his breakfast, to the last mouthful of the regulation bread, and to the last spoonful of the regulation coffee⁠—ay, even to the grounds (which, preponderating in that liquid, formed a species of stratum at the bottom of the basin, commonly known to the inmates of the asylum as “the thick”)⁠—for as the boy said, “grounds is strengthening.” Breakfast finished, the asylum physician came, in the course of his rounds, for his matutinal visit to Richard’s cell. His skill was entirely at a loss to find any cure for so strange a disease as that which affected the prisoner. One of the leading features, however, in this young man’s sickness, had been an entire loss of appetite, and almost an entire inability to sleep. When, therefore, he heard that his patient had eaten a good supper, slept well all night, and had just finished the regulation breakfast, he said⁠— + 

“Come, come, we are getting better, then⁠—our complaint is taking a turn. We are quiet in our mind, too, eh? Not fretting about Moscow, or making ourselves unhappy about Waterloo, I hope?” + 

The asylum doctor was a cheerful easy good-tempered fellow, who humoured the fancies of his patients, however wild they might be; and though half the kings in the history of England, and some sovereigns unchronicled in any history whatever were represented in the establishment, he was never known to forget the respect due to a monarch, however condescending that monarch might be. He was, therefore, a general favourite; and had received more orders of the Bath and the Garter, in the shape of red tape and scraps of paper, and more title-deeds, in the way of old curl-papers and bits of newspaper, than would have served as the stock-in-trade of a marine storekeeper, with the addition of a few bottles and a black doll. He knew that one characteristic of Richard’s madness was to fancy himself the chained eagle of the sea-bound rock, and he thought to humour the patient by humouring the hallucination. + 

Richard looked at this gentleman with a thoughtful glance in his dark eyes. + 

“I didn’t mind Moscow, sir,” he said, very gravely; “the elements beat me there⁠—and they were stronger than Hannibal; but at Waterloo, what broke my heart was⁠—not the defeat, but the disgrace!” He turned away his head as he spoke, and lay in silence, with his back turned to the good natured physician. + 

“No complaints about Sir Hudson Lowe, I hope?” said the medical man. “They give you everything you want, general?” + 

The good doctor, being so much in the habit of humouring his patients, had their titles always at the tip of his tongue; and walked about in a perfect atmosphere of Pinnock’s Goldsmith. + 

As the general made no reply to his question, the doctor looked from him to the boy, who had, out of respect to the medical official, descended from his pulpit, and stood tugging at a very diminutive lock of hair, with an action which he intended to represent a bow. + 

“Does he ask for anything?” asked the doctor. + 

“Don’t he, sir?” said the boy, answering one question with another. “He’s been doing nothin’ for ever so long but askin’ for a drop o’ wine. He says he feels a kind of sinkin’ that nothin’ but wine can cure.” + 

“He shall have it, then,” said the doctor. “A little port wine with a touch of iron in it would help to bring him round as soon as anything, and be sure you see that he takes it. I’ve been giving him quinine for some time past; but it has done so little towards making him stronger, that I sometimes doubt his having taken it. Has he complained of anything else?” + 

“Well, sir,” said the boy, this time looking at his questioner very intently, and seeming to consider every word before he said it, “there is somethin’ which I can make out from what he says when he talks to hisself⁠—and he does talk to hisself awful⁠—somethin’ which preys upon his mind very much; but I don’t suppose it’s much good mentioning it either.” Here he stopped, hesitating, and looking very earnestly at the doctor. + 

“Why not, my boy?” + 

“Because you see, sir, what he hankers after is agen the rules of the asylum⁠—leastways, the rules the Board makes for such as him.” + 

“But what is it, my good lad? Tell me what it is he wishes for?” said the medical man. + 

“Why, it’s a singular wish, I dare say, sir; but he’s allus a talkin’ about the other lun⁠—” he hesitated, as if out of delicacy towards Richard, and substituted the word “boarders” for that which he had been about to use⁠—“and he says, if he could only be allowed to mix with ’em now and then he’d be as happy as a king. But, of course, as I was a-tellin’ him when you come in, sir, that’s agen the rules of the establishment, and in consequence is impossible⁠—’cause why, these ’ere rules is like Swedes and Nasturtiums⁠—[the boy from Slopperton may possibly have been thinking of the Medes and Persians]⁠—and can’t be gone agen.” + 

“I don’t know about that,” said the good-natured doctor. “So, general,” he added, turning to Richard, who had shifted his position, and now lay looking at his visitor rather anxiously, “so, general, you would like to mix with your friends out there?” + 

“Indeed I should, sir.” Those deep and earnest dark eyes, with which Richard watched the doctor’s face, were scarcely the eyes of a madman. + 

“Very well, then,” said the medical man, “very well; we must see if it can’t be managed. But I say, general, you’ll find the Prince Regent among your fellow-boarders; and I wouldn’t answer for your not meeting with Lord Castlereagh, and that might cause unpleasantness⁠—eh, general?” + 

“No, no, sir; there’s no fear of that. Political differences should never⁠—” + 

“Interfere with private friendship. A noble sentiment, general. Very well, you shall mix with the other boarders tomorrow. I’ll speak to the Board about it this afternoon. This, luckily, is a Board-day. You’ll find George the Fourth a very nice fellow. He came here because he would take everything of other people’s that he could lay his hands on, and said he was only taking taxes from his subjects. Good day. I’ll send round some port wine immediately, and you shall have a couple of glasses a day given you; so keep up your spirits, general.” + 

“Well,” said the boy from Slopperton, as the doctor closed the door behind him, “that ’ere medical officer’s a regular brick: and all I can say is to repeat his last words⁠—which ought to be printed in gold letters a foot high⁠—and those words is⁠—‘Keep up your spirits, general.’ ” + 

II + 

Mr. Augustus Darley and Mr. Joseph Peters Go Out Fishing + 

A long period of incessant rains had by no means improved the natural beauties of the Sloshy; nor had it in any manner enhanced the advantages attending a residence on the banks of that river. The occupants of the houses by the waterside were in the habit of going to sleep at night with the firm conviction that the lower portion of their tenement was a comfortable kitchen, and awakening in the morning were apt to find it a miniature lake. + 

Then, again, the river had a knack of dropping in at odd times, in a friendly way, when least expected⁠—when Mrs. Jones was cooking the Sunday’s dinner, or while Mrs. Brown was gone to market; and, as its manner of entering an apartment was, after the fashion of a ghost in a melodrama, to rise through the floor, the surprise occasioned by its appearance was not unalloyed by vexation. + 

It would intrude, an uninvited guest, at a social tea-party, and suddenly isolate every visitor on his or her chair as on an island. + 

There was not a mouse or a black-beetle in any of the kitchens by the Sloshy whose life was worth the holding, such an enemy was the swelling water to all domestic peace or comfort. + 

It is true that to some fresh and adventurous spirits the rising of the river afforded a kind of eccentric gratification. It gave a smack of the flavour of Venice to the dull insipidity of Slopperton life; and to an imaginative mind every coal-barge that went by became a gondola, and only wanted a cavalier, with a very short doublet, pointed shoes, and a guitar, to make it perfection. + 

Indeed, Miss Jones, milliner and dressmaker, had been heard to say, that when she saw the water coming up to the parlour-windows she could hardly believe she was not really in the city of the winged horses, round the corner out of the square of St. Mark’s, and three doors from the Bridge of Sighs. Miss Jones was well up in Venetian topography, as she was engaged in the perusal of a powerful work in penny numbers, detailing the adventures of a celebrated “Bravo” of that city. + 

To the ardent minds of the juvenile denizens of the waterside the swollen river was a source of pure and unalloyed delight. To take a tour round one’s own back kitchen in a washing-tub, with a duster for a sail, is perhaps, at the age of six, a more perfect species of enjoyment than that afforded by any Alpine glories or Highland scenery through which we may wander in after-years, when Reason has taught us her cold lesson, that, however bright the sun may shine on one side of the mountain, the shadows are awaiting us on the other. + 

There is a gentleman in a cutaway coat and a white hat, smoking a very short and black clay pipe, as he loiters on the bank of the Sloshy. I wonder what he thinks of the river? + 

It is eight years since this gentleman was last in Slopperton; then he came as a witness in the trial of Richard Marwood; then he had a black eye, and was out-at-elbows; now, his optics are surrounded with no dark shades which mar their natural colour⁠—clear bright grey. Now, too, he is, to speak familiarly, in high feather. His cutaway coat of the newest fashion (for there is fashion even in cutaways); his plaid trousers, painfully tight at the knees, and admirably adapted to display the development of the calf, are still bright with the greens and blues of the Macdonald. His hat is not crushed or indented in above half-a-dozen directions⁠—a sign that it is comparatively new, for the circle in which he moves considers bonneting a friendly demonstration, and to knock a man’s hat off his head and into the gutter rather a polite attention. + 

Yes, during the last eight years the prospects of Mr. Augustus Darley⁠—(that is the name of the witness)⁠—have been decidedly looking up. Eight years ago he was a medical student, loose on wide London; eating bread-and-cheese and drinking bottled stout in dissecting-rooms, and chalking up alarming scores at the caravansary round the corner of Goodge Street⁠—when the proprietor of the caravansary would chalk up. There were days which that stern man refused to mark with a white stone. Now, he has a dispensary of his own; a marvellous place, which would be entirely devoted to scientific pursuits if dominoes and racing calendars did not in some degree predominate therein. This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the water; and in the streets and squares⁠—to say nothing of the court and mews⁠—round this establishment the name of Augustus Darley is synonymous with everything which is popular and pleasant. His very presence is said to be as good as physic. Now, as physic in the abstract, and apart from its curative qualities, is scarcely a very pleasant thing, this may be considered rather a doubtful compliment; but for all that, it was meant in perfect good faith, and what’s more, it meant a great deal. + 

When anybody felt ill, he sent for Gus Darley⁠—(he had never been called Mr. but once in his life, and then by a sheriff’s officer, who, arresting him for the first time, wasn’t on familiar terms; all Cursitor Street knew him as “Gus, old fellow,” and “Darley, my boy,” before long). If the patient was very bad, Gus told him a good story. If the case seemed a serious one, he sang a comic song. If the patient felt, in popular parlance, “low,” Darley would stop to supper; and if by that time the patient was not entirely restored, his medical adviser would send him a ha’porth of Epsom salts, or three-farthings’ worth of rhubarb and magnesia, jocosely labelled “The Mixture.” It was a comforting delusion, laboured under by every patient of Gus Darley’s, that the young surgeon prescribed for him a very mysterious and peculiar amalgamation of drugs, which, though certain death to any other man, was the only preparation in the whole pharmacopœia that could possibly keep him alive. + 

There was a saying current in the neighbourhood of the dispensary, to the effect that Gus Darley’s description of the Derby Day was the best Epsom salts ever invented for the cure of man’s diseases; and he has been known to come home from the races at ten o’clock at night, and assist at a sickbed (successfully), with a wet towel round his head, and a painful conviction that he was prescribing for two patients at once. + 

But all this time he is strolling by the swollen Sloshy, with his pipe in his mouth and a contemplative face, which ever and anon looks earnestly up the river. Presently he stops by a boat-builder’s yard, and speaks to a man at work. + 

“Well,” he says, “is that boat finished yet?” + 

“Yes, sir,” says the man, “quite finished, and uncommon well she looks too; you might eat your dinner off her; the paint’s as dry as a bone.” + 

“How about the false bottom I spoke of?” he asks. + 

“Oh, that’s all right, sir, two feet and a half deep, and six feet and a half long. I’ll tell you what, sir⁠—no offence⁠—but you must catch a precious sight more eels than I think you will catch, if you mean to fill the bottom of that ’ere punt.” + 

As the man speaks, he points to where the boat lies high and dry in the builder’s yard. A great awkward flat-bottomed punt, big enough to hold half-a-dozen people. + 

Gus strolls up to look at it. The man follows him. + 

He lifts up the bottom of the boat with a great thick loop of rope. It is made like a trapdoor, two feet and a half above the keel. + 

“Why,” said Gus, “a man could lie down in the keel of the boat, with that main deck over him.” + 

“To be sure he could, sir, and a pretty long un, too; though I don’t say much for its being a over-comfortable berth. He might feel himself rather cramped if he was of a restless disposition.” + 

Gus laughed, and said⁠—“You’re right, he might, certainly, poor fellow! Come, now, you’re rather a tall chap, I should like to see if you could lie down there comfortably for a minute or so. We’ll talk about some beer when you come out.” + 

The man looked at Mr. Darley with rather a puzzled glance. He had heard the legend of the mistletoe bough. He had helped to build the boat, but for all that there might be a hidden spring somewhere about it, and Gus’s request might conceal some sinister intent; but no one who had once looked our medical friend in the face ever doubted him; so the man laughed and said⁠— + 

“Well, you’re a rum un, whoever the other is” (people were rarely very deferential in their manner of addressing Gus Darley); “howsomedever, here’s to oblige you.” And the man got into the boat, and lying down, suffered Gus to lower the false bottom of it over him. + 

“How do you feel?” asks Gus. “Can you breathe?⁠—have you plenty of air?” + 

“All right, sir,” says the man through a hole in the plank. “It’s quite a extensive berth, when you’ve once settled yourself, only it ain’t much calculated for active exercise.” + 

“Do you think you could stand it for half an hour?” Gus inquires. + 

“Lor, bless you, sir! for half-a-dozen hours, if I was paid accordin’.” + 

“Should you think half-a-crown enough for twenty minutes?” + 

“Well, I don’t know, sir; suppose you made it three shillings?” + 

“Very good,” said Gus; “three shillings it shall be. It’s now half-past twelve;” he looks at his watch as he speaks. “I’ll sit here and smoke a pipe; and if you lie quiet till ten minutes to one, you’ll have earned the three bob.” + 

Gus steps into the boat, and seats himself at the prow; the man’s head lies at the stern. + 

“Can you see me?” Gus inquires. + 

“Yes, sir, when I squints.” + 

“Very well, then, you can see I don’t make a bolt of it. Make your mind easy: there’s five minutes gone already.” + 

Gus finishes his pipe, looks at his watch again⁠—a quarter to one. He whistles a scena from an opera, and then jumps out of the boat and pulls up the false bottom. + 

“All’s right,” he says; “time’s up.” + 

The man gets out and stretches his legs and arms, as if to convince himself that those members are unimpaired. + 

“Well, was it pretty comfortable?” Gus asks. + 

“Lor’ love you, sir! regular jolly, with the exception of bein’ rather warm, and makin’ a cove precious dry.” + 

Gus gives the man wherewith to assuage this drought, and says⁠— + 

“You may shove the boat down to the water, then. My friend will be here in a minute with the tackle, and we can then see about making a start.” + 

The boat is launched, and the man amuses himself with rowing a few yards up the river, while Gus waits for his friend. + 

In about ten minutes his friend arrives, in the person of Mr. Joseph Peters, of the police force, with a couple of eel-spears over his shoulder (which give him somewhat the appearance of a dry-land Neptune), and a good-sized carpetbag, which he carries in his hand. + 

Gus and he exchange a few remarks in the silent alphabet, in which Gus is almost as great an adept as the dumb detective, and they step into the punt. + 

The boat-builder’s man is sent for a gallon of beer in a stone bottle, a half-quartern loaf, and a piece of cheese. These provisions being shipped, Darley and Peters each take an oar, and they pull away from the bank and strike out into the middle of the river. + 

III + 

The Emperor Bids Adieu to Elba + 

On this same day, but at a later hour in the afternoon, Richard Marwood, better known as the Emperor Napoleon, joined the inmates of the county asylum in their daily exercise in the grounds allotted for that purpose. These grounds consisted of prim grass-plots, adorned with here and there a bed in which some dismal shrubs, or a few sickly chrysanthemums held up their gloomy heads, beaten and shattered by the recent heavy rains. These grass-plots were surrounded by stiff straight gravel-walks; and the whole was shut in by a high wall, surmounted by a chevaux-de-frise. The iron spikes composing this adornment had been added of late years; for, in spite of the comforts and attractions of the establishment, some foolish inhabitants thereof, languishing for gayer and more dazzling scenes, had been known to attempt, if not to effect, an escape from the numerous advantages of their home. I cannot venture to say whether or not the vegetable creation may have some mysterious sympathy with animated nature; but certainly no trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, or weeds ever grew like the trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, and weeds in the grounds of the county lunatic asylum. From the gaunt elm, which stretched out two great rugged arms, as if in a wild imprecation, such as might come from the lips of some human victim of the worst form of insanity, to the frivolous chickweed in a corner of a gravel-walk, which grew as if not a root, or leaf, or fibre but had a different purpose to its fellow, and flew off at its own peculiar tangent, with an infantine and kittenish madness, such as might have afflicted a lovesick miss of seventeen; from the great melancholy mad laurel-bushes that rocked themselves to and fro in the wind with a restlessness known only to the insane, to the eccentric dandelions that reared their disordered heads from amidst the troubled and dishevelled grass⁠—every green thing in that great place seemed more or less a victim to that terrible disease whose influence is of so subtle a nature, that it infects the very stones of the dark walls which shut in shattered minds that once were strong and whole, and fallen intellects that once were bright and lofty. + 

But as a stranger to this place, looking for the first time at the groups of men and women lounging slowly up and down these gravel-walks, perhaps what most startles you, perhaps even what most distresses you, is, that these wretched people scarcely seem unhappy. Oh, merciful and wondrous wise dispensation from Him who fits the back to bear the burden! He so appoints it. The man, whose doubts or fears, or wild aspirings to the misty far away, all the world’s wisdom could not yesterday appease, is today made happy by a scrap of paper or a shred of ribbon. We who, standing in the blessed light, look in upon this piteous mental darkness, are perhaps most unhappy, because we cannot tell how much or how little sorrow this death-in-life may shroud. They have passed away from us; their language is not our language, nor their world our world. I think someone has asked a strange question⁠—Who can tell whether their folly may not perhaps be better than our wisdom? He only, from whose mighty hand comes the music of every soul, can tell which is the discord and which the harmony. We look at them as we look at all else⁠—through the darkened glass of earth’s uncertainty. + 

No, they do not seem unhappy. Queen Victoria is talking to Lady Jane Grey about today’s dinner, and the reprehensible superabundance of fat in a leg-of-mutton served up thereat. Chronology never disturbs these good people; nobody thinks it any disgrace to be an anachronism. Lord Brougham will divide an unripe apple with Cicero, and William the Conqueror will walk arm-in-arm with Pius the Ninth, without the least uneasiness on the score of probability; and when, on one occasion, a gentleman, who for three years had enjoyed considerable popularity as Cardinal Wolsey, all of a sudden recovered, and confessed to being plain John Thomson, the inmates of the asylum were unanimous in feeling and expressing the most profound contempt for his unhappy state. + 

Today, however, Richard is the hero. He is surrounded immediately on his appearance by all the celebrities and a great many of the non-celebrities of the establishment. The Emperor of the German Ocean and the Chelsea Waterworks in particular has so much to say to him, that he does not know how to begin; and when he does begin, has to go back and begin again, in a manner both affable and bewildering. + 

Why did not Richard join them before, he asks⁠—they are so very pleasant, they are so very social; why, in goodness-gracious’ name (he opens his eyes very wide as he utters the name of goodness-gracious, and looks back over his shoulder rather as if he thinks he may have invoked some fiend), why did not Richard join them? + 

Richard tells him he was not allowed to do so. + 

On this, the potentate looks intensely mysterious. He is rather stout, and wears a headdress of has own manufacture⁠—a species of coronet, constructed of a newspaper and a blue-and-white bird’s-eye pocket-handkerchief. He puts his hands to the very furthest extent that he can push them into his trousers-pockets; plants himself right before Richard on the gravel-walk, and says, with a wink of intense significance, “Was it the Khan?” + 

Richard says, he thinks not. + 

“Not the Khan!” he mutters thoughtfully. “You really are of opinion that it was not the Khan?” + 

“I really am,” Richard replies. + 

“Then it lies between the last Duke of Devonshire but sixteen and Abd-el-Kader: I do hope it wasn’t Abd-el-Kader; I had a better opinion of Abd-el-Kader⁠—I had indeed.” + 

Richard looks rather puzzled, but says nothing. + 

“There has evidently,” continued his friend, “been some malignant influence at work to prevent your appearing amongst us before this. You have been a member of this society for, let me see, three hundred and sixty-three years⁠—be kind enough to set me right if I make a misstatement⁠—three hundred and⁠—did I say seventy-twelve years?⁠—and you have never yet joined us! Now, there is something radically wrong here; to use the language of the ancients in their religious festivals, there is ‘a screw loose.’ You ought to have joined us, you really ought! We are very social; we are positively buoyant; we have a ball every evening. Well, no, perhaps it is not every evening. My ideas as to time, I am told, are vague; but I know it is either every ten years, or every other week. I incline to thinking it must be every other week. On these occasions we dance. Are you a votary of Terp⁠—what-you-may-call-her, the lady who had so many unmarried sisters? Do you incline to the light fantastic?” By way of illustration, the Emperor of the Waterworks executed a caper, which would have done honour to an elderly elephant taking his first lesson in the polka. + 

There was one advantage in conversing with this gentleman. If his questions were sometimes of rather a difficult and puzzling nature, he never did anything so underbred as to wait for an answer. It now appeared for the first time to strike him, that perhaps the laws of exclusiveness had in some manner been violated, by a person of his distinction having talked so familiarly to an entire stranger; he therefore suddenly skipped a pace or two backwards, leaving a track of small open graves in the damp gravel made by the impression of his feet, and said, in a tone of voice so dignified as to be almost freezing⁠— + 

“Pray, to whom have I the honour to make these observations?” + 

Richard regretted to say he had not a card about him, but added⁠—“You may have heard of the Emperor Napoleon?” + 

“Bonaparte? Oh, certainly; very frequently, very frequently: and you are that worthy person? Dear me! this is very sad. Not at your charming summer residence at Moscow, or your pleasant winter retreat on the field of Waterloo: this is really distressing, very.” + 

His pity for Richard was so intense, that he was moved to tears, and picked a dandelion with which to wipe his eyes. + 

“My Chelsea property,” he said presently, “is fluctuating⁠—very. I find a tendency in householders to submit to having their water cut off, rather than pay the rate. Our only plan is to empty every cistern half an hour before teatime. Persevered in for a week or so, we find that course has a harassing effect, and they pay. But all this is wearing for the nerves⁠—very.” + 

He shook his head solemnly, rubbed his eyes very hard with the dandelion, and then ate that exotic blossom. + 

“An agreeable tonic,” he said; “known to be conducive to digestion. My German Ocean I find more profitable, on account of the sea-bathing.” + 

Richard expressed himself very much interested in the commercial prospects of his distinguished friend; but at this moment they were interrupted by the approach of a lady, who, with a peculiar hop, skip, and jump entirely her own, came up to the Emperor of the Waterworks and took hold of his arm. + 

She was a gushing thing of some forty-odd summers, and wore a bonnet, the very purchase of which would have stamped her as of unsound intellect, without need of any further proof whatever. To say that it was like a coal-scuttle was nothing; to say that it resembled a coal-scuttle which had suffered from an aggravated attack of water on the brain, and gone mad, would be perhaps a little nearer the mark. Imagine such a bonnet adorned with a green veil, rather bigger than an ordinary table cloth, and three quill pens tastefully inserted in the direction in which Parisian milliners are wont to place the plumage of foreign birds⁠—and you may form some idea of the lady’s headgear. Her robes were short and scanty, but plentifully embellished with a species of trimming, which to an ordinary mind suggested strips of calico, but which amongst the inmates passed current as Valenciennes lace. Below these robes appeared a pair of apple-green boots⁠—boots of a pattern such as no shoemaker of sound mind ever in his wildest dreams could have originated, but which in this establishment were voted rather recherché than otherwise. This lady was no other than the damsel who had suggested an elopement with Richard some eight years ago, and who claimed for her distinguished connections the Pope and the muffin-man. + 

“Well,” she said to the Emperor of the Waterworks, with a voice and manner which would have been rather absurdly juvenile in a girl of fifteen⁠—“and where has its precious one been hiding since dinner? Was it the fat mutton which rendered the most brilliant of mankind unfit for general society; or was it that it ‘had a heart for falsehood framed?’ I hope it was the fat mutton.” + 

“It’s precious one” looked from the charmer at his side to Richard, with rather an apologetic shrug. + 

“The sex is weak,” he said, “conqueror of Agincourt⁠—I beg pardon, Waterloo. The sex is weak: it is a fact established alike by medical science and political economy. Poor thing! she loves me.” + 

The lady, for the first time, became aware of the presence of Richard. She dropped a very low curtesy, in the performance of which one of the green boots described a complete circle, and said⁠— + 

“From Gloucestershire, sir?” interrogatively. + 

“The Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte,” said the proprietor of the German Ocean. “My dear, you ought to know him.” + 

“The Emperor Nap‑o‑le‑on Bo‑na‑parte,” she said very slowly, checking off the syllables on her fingers, “and from Gloucestershire? How gratifying! All our great men come from Gloucestershire. It is a well-known fact⁠—from Gloucestershire? Muffins were invented in Gloucestershire by Alfred the Great. Did you know our dear Alfred? You are perhaps too young⁠—a great loss, my dear sir, a great loss; conglomerated essence of toothache on the cerebral nerves took him off in fourteen days, three weeks, and one month. We tried everything, from dandelions”⁠—(her eyes wandered as if searching the grounds for information as to what they had tried)⁠—“from dandelions to chevaux-de-frise⁠—” + 

She stopped abruptly, staring Richard full in the face, as if she expected him to say something; but as he said nothing, she became suddenly interested in the contemplation of the green boots, looking first at one and then at the other, as if revolving in her mind the probability of their wanting mending. + 

Presently she looked up, and said with great solemnity⁠— + 

“Do you know the muffin-man?” + 

Richard shook his head. + 

“He lives in Drury Lane,” she added, looking at him rather sternly, as much as to say, “Come, no nonsense! you know him well enough!” + 

“No,” said Richard, “I don’t remember having met him.” + 

“There are seventy-nine of us who know the muffin-man in this establishment, sir⁠—seventy-nine; and do you dare to stand there and tell me that you⁠—” + 

“I assure you, madam, I have not the honour of his acquaintance.” + 

“Not know the muffin-man!⁠—you don’t know the muffin-man! Why, you contemptible stuck-up jackanapes⁠—” + 

What the lady might have gone on to say, it would be difficult to guess. She was not celebrated for the refinement of her vocabulary when much provoked; but at this moment a great stout man, one of the keepers, came up, and cried out⁠— + 

“Holloa! what’s all this!” + 

“He says he doesn’t know the muffin-man!” exclaimed the lady, her veil flying in the wind like a pennant, her arms akimbo, and the apple-green boots planted in a defiant manner on the gravel-walk. + 

“Oh, we know him well enough,” said the man, with a wink at Richard, “and very slack he bakes his muffins.” Having uttered which piece of information connected with the gentleman in question, the keeper strolled off, giving just one steady look straight into the eyes of the lively damsel, which seemed to have an instantaneous and most soothing effect upon her nerves. + 

As all the lunatics allowed to disport themselves for an hour in the gardens of the establishment were considered to be, upon the whole, pretty safe, the keepers were not in the habit of taking much notice of them. Those officials would congregate in little groups here and there, talking among themselves, and apparently utterly regardless of the unhappy beings over whom it was their duty to watch. But let Queen Victoria or the Emperor Nero, Lady Jane Grey or Lord John Russell, suffer themselves to be led away by their respective hobbies, or to ride those animals at too outrageous and dangerous a pace, and a strong hand would be laid upon the rider’s shoulder, accompanied by a recommendation to “go indoors,” which was very seldom disregarded. + 

As Richard was this afternoon permitted to mix with his fellow-prisoners for the first time, the boy from Slopperton was ordered to keep an eye upon him; and a very sharp eye the boy kept, never for one moment allowing a look, word, or action of the prisoner to escape him. + 

The keepers this afternoon were assembled near the portico, before which the gardens extended to the high outer wall. The ground between the portico and the wall was a little less than a quarter of a mile in length, and at the bottom was the grand entrance and the porter’s lodge. The gardens surrounded the house on three sides, and on the left side the wall ran parallel with the river Sloshy. This river was now so much swollen by the late heavy rains that the waters washed the wall to the height of four feet, entirely covering the towing-path, which lay ordinarily between the wall and the waterside. + 

Now Richard and the Emperor of the Waterworks, accompanied by the gushing charmer in the green boots, being all three engaged in friendly though rather erratic conversation, happened to stroll in the direction of the grounds on this side, and consequently out of sight of the keepers. + 

The boy from Slopperton was, however, close upon their heels. This young gentleman had his hands in his pockets, and was loitering and lounging along with an air which seemed to say, that neither man nor woman gave him any more delight than they had afforded the Danish prince of used-up memory. Perhaps it was in utter weariness of life that he was, as if unconsciously, employed in whistling the melody of a song, supposed to relate to a passage in the life of a young lady of the name of Gray, christian name Alice, whose heart it was another’s, and consequently, by pure logic, never could belong to the singer. + 

Now there may be something infectious in this melody; for no sooner had the boy from Slopperton whistled the first few bars, than some person in the distance outside the walls of the asylum gardens took up the air and finished it. A trifling circumstance this in itself; but it appeared to afford the boy considerable gratification; and he presently came suddenly upon Richard in the middle of a very interesting conversation, and whispered in his ear, or rather at his elbow, “All right, general!” Now as Richard, the Emperor of the Waterworks, and the only daughter of the Pope all talked at once, and all talked of entirely different subjects, their conversation might, perhaps, have been just a little distracting to a shorthand reporter; but as a conversation, it was really charming. + 

Richard⁠—still musing on the wild idea which was known in the asylum to have possessed his disordered brain ever since the day of his trial⁠—was giving his companions an account of his escape from Elba. + 

“I was determined,” he said, taking the Emperor of the Waterworks by the button, “I was determined to make one desperate effort to return to my friends in France⁠—” + 

“Very creditable, to be sure,” said the damsel of the green boots; “your sentiments did you honour.” + 

“But to escape from the island was an enterprise of considerable difficulty,” continued Richard. + 

“Of course,” said the damsel, “considering the price of flour. Flour rose a halfpenny in the bushel in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, which, of course, reduced the size of muffins⁠—” + 

“And had a depressing effect upon the water-rates,” interrupted the gentleman. + 

“Now,” continued Richard, “the island of Elba was surrounded by a high wall⁠—” + 

“A very convenient arrangement; of course facilitating the process of cutting off the water from the inhabitants,” muttered the Emperor of the German Ocean. + 

The boy Slosh again expressed his feelings with reference to Alice Gray, and someone on the other side of the wall coincided with him. + 

“And,” said Richard, “on the top of this wall was a chevaux-de-frise.” + 

“Dear me,” exclaimed the Emperor, “quite a what-you-may-call-it. I mean an extraordinary coincidence; we too have a chevaux-de-thing-a-me, for the purpose, I believe, of keeping out the cats. Cats are unpleasant; especially,” he added, thoughtfully, “especially the Tom-sex⁠—I mean the sterner sex.” + 

“To surmount this wall was my great difficulty.” + 

“Naturally, naturally,” said the damsel, “a great undertaking, considering the fall in muffins⁠—a dangerous undertaking.” + 

“There was a boat waiting to receive me on the other side,” said Richard, glancing at the wall, which was about a hundred yards distant from him. + 

Some person on the other side of the wall had got a good deal nearer by this time; and, dear me, how very much excited he was about Alice Gray. + 

“But the question,” Richard continued, “was how to climb the wall,”⁠—still looking up at the chevaux-de-frise. + 

“I should have tried muffins,” said the lady. + 

“I should have cut off the water,” remarked the gentleman. + 

“I did neither,” said Richard; “I tried a rope.” + 

At this very moment, by some invisible agency, a thickly-knotted rope was thrown across the chevaux-de-frise, and the end fell within about four feet of the ground. + 

“But her heart it is another’s, and it never can be mine.” + 

The gentleman who couldn’t succeed in winning the affections of Miss Gray was evidently close to the wall now. + 

In a much shorter time than the very greatest master in the art of stenography could possibly have reported the occurrence, Richard threw the Emperor of the Waterworks half-a-dozen yards from him, with such violence as to cause that gentleman to trip-up the heels of the only daughter of the Pope, and fall in a heap upon that lady as on a feather bed; and then, with the activity of a cat or a sailor, clambered up the rope, and disappeared over the chevaux-de-frise. + 

The gentleman outside was now growing indifferent to the loss of Miss Gray, for he whistled the melody in a most triumphant manner, keeping time with the sharp plash of his oars in the water. + 

It took the Emperor and his female friend some little time to recover from the effects of the concussion they had experienced, each from each; and when they had done so, they stood for a few moments looking at one another in mute amazement. + 

“The gentleman has left the establishment,” at last said the lady. + 

“And a bruise on my elbow,” muttered the gentleman, rubbing the locality in question. + 

“Such a very unpolite manner of leaving too,” said the lady. “His muffins⁠—I mean his manners⁠—have evidently been very much neglected.” + 

“He must be a Chelsea householder,” said the Emperor. “The householders of Chelsea are proverbial for bad manners. They are in the habit of slamming the door in the face of the tax-gatherer, with a view to injuring the tip of his nose; and I’m sure Lord Chesterfield never advised his son to do that.” + 

It may be as well here to state that the Emperor of the Waterworks had in early life been collector of the water-rate in the neighbourhood of Chelsea; but having unfortunately given his manly intellect to drinking, and being further troubled with a propensity for speculation (some people pronounced the word without the first letter), which involved the advantageous laying-out of his sovereign’s money for his own benefit, he had first lost his situation and ultimately his senses. + 

His lady friend had once kept a baker’s shop in the vicinity of Drury Lane, and happening, in an evil hour, at the ripe age of forty, to place her affections on a young man of nineteen, the bent of whose genius was muffins, and being slighted by the youth in question, she had retired into the gin-bottle, and thence had been passed to the asylum of her native country. + 

Perhaps the inquiring reader will ask what the juvenile guardian of Richard is doing all this time? He has been told to keep an eye upon him; and how has he kept his trust? + 

He is standing, very coolly, staring at the lady and gentleman before him, and is apparently much interested in their conversation. + 

“I shall certainly go,” said the Emperor of the Waterworks, after a pause, “and inform the superintendent of this proceeding⁠—the superintendent ought really to know of it.” + 

“Superintendent” was, in the asylum, the polite name given the keepers. But just as the Emperor began to shamble off in the direction of the front of the house, the boy called Slosh flew past him and ran on before, and by the time the elderly gentleman reached the porch, the boy had told the astonished keepers the whole story of the escape. + 

The keepers ran down to the gate, called to the porter to have it opened, and in a few minutes were in the road in front of it. They hurried thence to the riverside. There was not a sign of any human being on the swollen waters, except two men in a punt close to the opposite shore, who appeared to be eel-spearing. + 

“There’s no boat nearer than that,” said one of the men; “he never could have reached that in this time if he had been the best swimmer in England.” + 

The men took it for granted that they had been informed of his escape the moment it occurred. + 

“He must have jumped slap into the water,” said another; “perhaps he’s about somewhere, contriving to keep his head under.” + 

“He couldn’t do it,” said the first man who had spoken; “it’s my opinion the poor chap’s drowned. They will try these escapes, though no one ever succeeded yet.” + 

There was a boat moored at the angle of the asylum wall, and one of the men sprang into it. + 

“Show me the place where he jumped over the wall,” he called to the boy, who pointed out the spot at his direction. + 

The man rowed up to it. + 

“Not a sign of him anywhere about here!” he cried. + 

“Hadn’t you better call to those men?” asked his comrade; “they must have seen him jump.” + 

The man in the boat nodded assent, and rowed across the river to the two fishermen. + 

“Holloa!” he said, “have you seen anyone get over that wall?” + 

One of the men, who had just impaled a fine eel, looked up with a surprised expression, and asked⁠— + 

“Which wall?” + 

“Why the asylum, yonder, straight before you.” + 

“The asylum! Now, you don’t mean to say that that’s the asylum; and I’ve been taking it for a gentleman’s mansion and grounds all the time,” said the angler (who was no other than Mr. Augustus Darley), taking his pipe out of his mouth. + 

“I wish you’d give a straight answer to my question,” said the man; “have you seen anyone jump over that wall; yes, or no?” + 

“Then, no!” said Gus; “if I had, I should have gone over and picked him up, shouldn’t I, stupid?” + 

The other fisherman, Mr. Peters, here looked up, and laying down his eel-spear, spelt out some words on his fingers. + 

“Stop a bit,” cried Gus to the man, who was rowing off, “here’s my friend says he heard a splash in the water ten minutes ago, and thought it was some rubbish shot over the wall.” + 

“Then he did jump! Poor chap, I’m afraid he must be drowned.” + 

“Drowned?” + 

“Yes; don’t I tell you one of the lunatics has been trying to escape over that wall, and must have fallen into the river?” + 

“Why didn’t you say so before, then?” said Gus. “What’s to be done? Where are there any drags?” + 

“Why, half a mile off, worse luck, at a public-house down the river, the ‘Jolly Lifeboat.’ ” + 

“Then I’ll tell you what,” said Gus, “my friend and I will row down and fetch the drags, while you chaps keep a lookout about here.” + 

“You’re very good, sir,” said the man; “dragging the river’s about all we can do now, for it strikes me we’ve seen the last of the Emperor Napoleon. My eyes! won’t there be a row about it with the Board!” + 

“Here we go,” says Gus; “keep a good heart; he may turn up yet;” with which encouraging remarks Messrs. Darley and Peters struck off at a rate which promised the speedy arrival of the drags. + 

IV + 

Joy and Happiness for Everybody + 

Whether the drags reached the county asylum in time to be of any service is still a mystery; but Mr. Joseph Peters arrived with the punt at the boat-builder’s yard in the dusk of the autumn evening. He was alone, and he left his boat, his tridents, and other fishing-tackle in the care of the men belonging to the yard, and then putting his hands in his pockets, trudged off in the direction of Little Gulliver Street. + 

If ever Mr. Peters had looked triumphant in his life, he looked triumphant this evening: if ever his mouth had been on one side, it was on one side this evening; but it was the twist of a conqueror which distorted that feature. + 

Eight years, too, have done something for Kuppins. Time hasn’t forgotten Kuppins, though she is a humble individual. Time has touched up Kuppins; adding a little bit here, and taking away a little bit there, and altogether producing something rather imposing. Kuppins has grown. When that young lady had attained her tenth year, there was a legend current in little Gulliver Street and its vicinity, that in consequence of a fatal predilection for gin-and-bitters evinced by her mother during the infancy of Kuppins, that diminutive person would never grow any more: but she gave the lie both to the legend and the gin-and-bitters by outgrowing her frocks at the advanced age of seventeen; and now she was rather a bouncing young woman than otherwise, and had a pair of such rosy cheeks as would have done honour to healthier breezes than those of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy. + 

Time had done something, too, for Kuppins’s shock of hair, for it was now brushed, and combed, and dragged, and tortured into a state not so very far from smoothness; and it was furthermore turned up; an achievement in the hairdressing line which it had taken her some years to effect, and which, when effected, was perhaps a little calculated to remind the admiring beholder of a good-sized ball of black cotton with a hairpin stuck through it. + 

What made Kuppins in such a state of excitement on this particular evening, who shall say? Certain it is that she was excited. At the first sound of the click of Mr. Peters’s latchkey in the door of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, Kuppins, with a lighted candle, flew to open it. How she threw her arms round Mr. Peters’s neck and kissed him⁠—how she left a lump of tallow in his hair, and a smell of burning in his whiskers⁠—how, in her excitement she blew the candle out⁠—and how, by a feat of leger-de-main, or leger-de-lungs, she blew it in again, must have been seen to be sufficiently appreciated. Her next proceeding was to drag Mr. Peters upstairs into the indoor Eden, which bore the very same appearance it had done eight years ago. One almost expected to find the red baby grown up⁠—but it wasn’t; and that dreadful attack of the mumps from which the infant had suffered when Mr. Peters first became acquainted with it did not appear to have abated in the least. Kuppins thrust the detective into his own particular chair, planted herself in an opposite seat, put the candlestick on the table, snuffed the candle, and then, with her eyes opened to the widest extent, evidently awaited his saying something. + 

He did say something⁠—in his own way, of course; the fingers went to work. “I’ve d⁠—” said the fingers. + 

“’One it,” cried Kuppins, dreadfully excited by this time, “done it! you’ve done it! Didn’t I always say you would? Didn’t I know you would? Didn’t I always dream you would, three times running, and a house on fire?⁠—that meant the river; and an army of soldiers⁠—that meant the boat; and everybody in black clothes⁠—meaning joy and happiness. It’s come true; it’s all come out. Oh, I’m so happy!” In proof of which Kuppins immediately commenced a series of evolutions of the limbs and exercises of the human voice, popularly known in the neighbourhood as strong hysterics⁠—so strong, in fact, that Mr. Peters couldn’t have held her still if he had tried. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t try; but he looked about in every direction for something cold to put down her back, and finding nothing handy but the poker, he stirred her up with that in the neighbourhood of the spinal marrow, as if she had been a bad fire; whereon she came to. + 

“And where’s the blessed boy?” she asked, presently. + 

Mr. Peters signified upon his fingers that the blessed boy was still at the asylum, and that there he must remain till such time as he should be able to leave without raising suspicion. + 

“And to think,” said Kuppins, “that we should have seen the advertisement for a boy to wait upon poor Mr. Marwood; and to think that we should have thought of sending our Slosh to take the situation; and to think that he should have been so clever in helping you through with it! Oh my!” As Kuppins here evinced a desire for a second edition of the hysterics, Mr. Peters changed the conversation by looking inquiringly towards a couple of saucepans on the fire. + 

“Tripe,” said Kuppins, answering the look, “and taters, floury ones;” whereon she began to lay the supper-table. Kuppins was almost mistress of the house now, for the elderly proprietress was a sufferer from rheumatism, and kept to her room, enlivened by the society of a large black cat, and such gossip as Kuppins collected about the neighbourhood in the course of the day and retailed to her mistress in the evening. So we leave Mr. Peters smoking his pipe and roasting his legs at his own hearth, while Kuppins dishes the tripe and onions, and strips the floury potatoes of their russet jackets. + 

Where all this time is the Emperor Napoleon? + 

There are two gentlemen pacing up and down the platform of the Birmingham station, waiting for the 10 p.m. London express. One of them is Mr. Augustus Darley; the other is a man wrapped in a greatcoat, who has red hair and whiskers, and wears a pair of spectacles; but behind these spectacles there are dark brown eyes, which scarcely match the red hair, any better than the pale dark complexion agrees with the very roseate hue of the whiskers. These two gentlemen have come across the country from a little station a few miles from Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy. + 

“Well, Dick,” said Darley, “doesn’t this bring back old times, my boy?” + 

The red-haired gentleman, who was smoking a cigar, took it from his mouth and clasped his companion by the hand, and said⁠— + 

“It does, Gus, old fellow; and when I forget the share you’ve had in today’s work, may I⁠—may I go back to that place and eat out my own heart, as I have done for eight years!” + 

There was something so very like a mist behind his spectacles, and such an ominous thickness in his voice, as the red-haired gentleman said this, that Gus proposed a glass of brandy before the train started. + 

“Come, Dick, old fellow, you’re quite womanish tonight, I declare. This won’t do, you know. I shall have to knock up some of our old pals and make a jolly night of it, when we get to London; though it will be tomorrow morning if you go on in this way.” + 

“I’ll tell you what it is, Gus,” replied the red-haired gentleman, “nobody who hadn’t gone through what I’ve gone through could tell what I feel tonight. I think, Gus, I shall end by being mad in real earnest; and that my release will do what my imprisonment even couldn’t effect⁠—turn my brain. But I say, Gus, tell me, tell me the truth; did any of the old fellows⁠—did they ever think me guilty?” + 

“Not one of them, Dick, not one; and I know if one of them had so much as hinted at such a thought, the others would have throttled him before he could have said the words. Have another drop of brandy,” he said hastily, thrusting the glass into his hand; “you’ve no more pluck than a kitten or a woman, Dick.” + 

“I had pluck enough to bear eight years of that,” said the young man, pointing in the direction of Slopperton, “but this does rather knock me over. My mother, you’ll write to her, Gus⁠—the sight of my hand might upset her, without a word of warning⁠—you’ll write and tell her that I’ve got a chance of escaping; and then you’ll write and say that I have escaped. We must guard against a shock, Gus; she has suffered too much already on my account.” + 

At this moment the bell rang for the train’s starting: the young men took their seats in a second-class carriage; and away sped the engine, out through the dingy manufacturing town, into the open moonlit country. + 

Gus and Richard light their cigars, and wrap themselves in their railway rugs. Gus throws himself back and drops off to sleep (he can almost smoke in his sleep), and in a quarter of an hour he is dreaming of a fidgety patient who doesn’t like comic songs, and who can never see the point of a joke; but who has three pretty daughters, and who pays his bill every Christmas without even looking at the items. + 

But Richard Marwood doesn’t go to sleep. Will he ever sleep again? Will his nerves ever regain their tranquillity, after the intense excitement of the last three or four days? He looks back⁠—looks back at that hideous time, and wonders at its hopeless suffering⁠—wonders till he is obliged to wrench his mind away from the subject, for fear he should go mad. How did he ever endure it? How did he ever live through it? He had no means of suicide? Pshaw! he might have dashed out his brains against the wall. He might have resolutely refused food, and so have starved himself to death. How did he endure it. Eight years! Eight centuries! and every hour a fresh age of anguish! Looking back now, he knows, what then he did not know, that at the worst⁠—that in his bitterest despair, there was a vague undefined something, so vague and undefined that he did not recognise it for itself⁠—a glimmering ray of hope, by the aid of which alone he bore the dreadful burden of his days; and with clasped hands and bent head he renders up to that God from whose pity came this distant light a thanksgiving, which perhaps is not the less sincere and heartfelt for a hundred reckless words, said long ago, which rise up now in his mind a shame and a reproach. + 

Perhaps it was such a trial as this that Richard Marwood wanted, to make him a good and earnest man. Something to awaken dormant energies; something to arouse the better feelings of a noble soul, to stimulate to action an intellect hitherto wasted; something to throw him back upon the God he had forgotten, and to make him ultimately that which God, in creating such a man, meant him to become. + 

Away flies the engine. Was there ever such an open country? Was there ever such a moonlight night? Was earth ever so fair, or the heavens ever so bright, since man’s universe was created? Not for Richard! He is free; free to breathe that blessed air; to walk that glorious earth; free to track to his doom the murderer of his uncle. + 

In the dead of the night the express train rattles into the Euston Square station; Richard and Gus spring out, and jump into a cab. Even smoky London, asleep under the moonlight, is beautiful in the eyes of Daredevil Dick, as they rattle through the deserted streets on the way to their destination. + 

V + 

The Cherokees Take an Oath + 

The cab stops in a narrow street in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, before the door of a small public-house, which announces itself, in tarnished gilt letters on a dirty board, as “The Cherokee, by Jim Stilson.” Jim Stilson is a very distinguished professor of the noble art of self-defence; and (in consequence of a peculiar playful knack he has with his dexter fist) is better known to his friends and the general public as the Left-handed Smasher. + 

Of course, at this hour of the night, the respectable hostelry is wrapped in that repose which befits the house of a landlord who puts up his shutters and locks his door as punctually as the clocks of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes strike the midnight hour. There is not so much as the faintest glimmer of a rushlight in one of the upper windows; but for all that, Richard and Darley alight, and having dismissed the cab, Gus looks up and down the street to see that it is clear, puts his lips to the keyhole of the door of Mr. Stilson’s hostelry, and gives an excellent imitation of the feeble meow of an invalid member of the feline species. + 

Perhaps the Left-handed Smasher is tenderhearted, and nourishes an affection for distressed grimalkins; for the door is softly opened⁠—just wide enough to admit Richard and his friend. + 

The person who opens the door is a young lady, who has apparently been surprised in the act of putting her hair in curl-papers, as she hurriedly thrusts her brush and comb in among the biscuits and meat-pies in a corner of the bar. She is evidently very sleepy, and rather inclined to yawn in Mr. Augustus Darley’s face; but as soon as they are safe inside, she fastens the door and resumes her station behind the bar. There is only one gas-lamp alight, and it is rather difficult to believe that the gentleman seated in the easy-chair before an expiring fire in the bar-parlour, his noble head covered with a red cotton bandana, is neither more nor less than the immortal Left-handed one; but he snores loud enough for the whole prize-ring, and the nervous listener is inclined to wish that he had made a point of clearing his head before he went to sleep. + 

“Well, Sophia Maria,” says Mr. Darley, “are they all up there?” pointing in the direction of a door that leads to the stairs. + 

“Most every one of ’em, sir; there’s no getting ’em to break up, nohow. Mr. Splitters has been and wrote a drama for the Victoria Theayter, and they’ve been a-chaffing of him awful because there’s fifteen murders, and four low-comedy servants that all say, ‘No you don’t,’ in it. The guv’nor had to go up just now, and talk to ’em, for they was a throwin’ quart pots at each other, playful.” + 

“Then I’ll run up, and speak to them for a minute,” said Gus. “Come along, Dick.” + 

“How about your friend, sir,” remonstrated the Smasher’s Hebe; “he isn’t a Cheerful, is he, sir?” + 

“Oh, I’ll answer for him,” said Gus. “It’s all right, Sophia Maria; bring us a couple of glasses of brandy-and-water hot, and tell the Smasher to step up, when I ring the bell.” + 

Sophia Maria looked doubtfully from Gus to the slumbering host, and said⁠— + 

“He’ll wake up savage if I disturb him. He’s off for his first sleep now, and he’ll go to bed as soon as the place is clear.” + 

“Never mind, Sophia; wake him up when I ring, and send him upstairs; he’ll find something there to put him in a good temper. Come, Dick, tumble up. You know the way.” + 

The Cheerful Cherokees made their proximity known by such a stifling atmosphere of tobacco about the staircase as would have certainly suffocated anyone not initiated in their mysteries. Gus opened the door of a back room on the first floor, of a much larger size than the general appearance of the house would have promised. This room was full of gentlemen, who, in age, size, costume, and personal advantages, varied as much as it is possible for any one roomful of gentlemen to do. Some of them were playing billiards; some of them were looking on, betting on the players; or more often upbraiding them for such play as, in the Cheerful dialect, came under the sweeping denunciation of the Cherokee adjective “duffing.” Some of them were eating a peculiar compound entitled “Welsh rarebit”⁠—a pleasant preparation, if it had not painfully reminded the casual observer of mustard-poultices, or yellow soap in a state of solution⁠—while lively friends knocked the ashes of their pipes into their plates, abstracted their porter just as they were about to imbibe that beverage, and in like fascinating manner beguiled the festive hour. One gentleman, a young Cherokee, had had a rarebit, and had gone to sleep with his head in his plate and his eyebrows in his mustard. Some were playing cards; some were playing dominoes; one gentleman was in tears, because the double six he wished to play had fallen into a neighbouring spittoon, and he lacked either the moral courage or the physical energy requisite for picking it up; but as, with the exception of the sleepy gentleman, everybody was talking very loud and on an entirely different subject, the effect was lively, not to say distracting. + 

“Gentlemen,” said Gus, “I have the honour of bringing a friend, whom I wish to introduce to you.” + 

“All right, Gus!” said the gentleman engaged at dominoes, “that’s the cove I ought to play,” and fixing one half-open eye on the spotted ivory, he lapsed into a series of imbecile imprecations on everybody in general, and the domino in particular. + 

Richard took a seat at a little distance from this gentleman, and at the bottom of the long table⁠—a seat sacred on grand occasions to the vice-chairman. Some rather noisy lookers-on at the billiards were a little inclined to resent this, and muttered something about Dick’s red wig and whiskers, in connection with the popular accompaniments to a boiled round of beef. + 

“I say, Darley,” cried a gentleman, who held a billiard-cue in his hand, and had been for some time impotently endeavouring to smooth his hair with the same. “I say, old fellow, I hope your friend’s committed a murder or two, because then Splitters can put him in a new piece.” + 

Splitters, who had for four hours been in a state of abject misery, from the unmerciful allusions to his last chef d’œuvre, gave a growl from a distant corner of the table, where he was seeking consolation in everybody else’s glass; and as everybody drank a different beverage, was not improving his state of mind thereby. + 

“My friend never committed a murder in his life, Splitters, so he won’t dramatize on that score; but he’s been accused of one; and he’s as innocent as you are, who never murdered anything in your life but Lindley Murray and the language of your country.” + 

“Who’s been murdering somebody?” said the domino-player, passing his left hand through his hair, till his chevelure resembled a turk’s-head broom. “Who’s murdered? I wish everybody was; and that I could dance my favourite dance upon their graves. Blow that double-six; he’s the fellow I ought to play.” + 

“Perhaps you’ll give us your auburn-haired friend’s name, Darley,” said a gentleman with his mouth full of Welsh rarebit; “he doesn’t seem too brilliant to live; he’d better have gone to the ‘Deadly Livelies,’ in the other street.” The “Deadly Livelies” was the sobriquet of a rival club, which plumed itself on being a cut above the Cherokees. “Who’s dead?” muttered the domino-player. “I wish everybody was, and that I was contracted with to bury ’em cheap. I should have won the game,” he added plaintively, “if I could have picked up that double-six.” + 

“I suppose your friend wants to be Vice at our next meeting,” said the gentleman with the billiard-cue; who, in default of a row, always complained that the assembly was too quiet for him. + 

“It wouldn’t be the first time if he were Vice, and it wouldn’t be the first time if you made him Chair,” said Gus. “Come, old fellow, tell them you’re come back, and ask them if they’re glad to see you?” + 

The red-haired gentleman at this sprang to his feet, threw off the rosy locks and the ferocious whiskers, and looked round at the Cherokees with his hands in his pockets. + 

“Daredevil Dick!” A shout arose⁠—one brief wild huzza, such as had not been heard in that room⁠—which, as we know, was none of the quietest⁠—within the memory of the oldest Cherokee. Daredevil Dick⁠—escaped⁠—come back⁠—as handsome as ever⁠—as jolly as ever⁠—as glorious a fellow⁠—as thoroughgoing a brick⁠—as noble-hearted a trump as eight years ago, when he had been the life and soul of all of them! such shaking of hands; everybody shaking hands with him again and again, and then everybody shaking hands with everybody else; and the billiard-player wiping his eyes with his cue; and the sleepy gentleman waking up and rubbing the mustard into his drowsy optics; and the domino-player, who, though he execrates all mankind, wouldn’t hurt the tiniest wing of the tiniest fly, even he makes a miraculous effort, picks up the double-six, and magnanimously presents it to Richard. + 

“Take it⁠—take it, old fellow, and may it make you happy! If I’d played that domino, I should have won the game.” Upon which he executed two or three steps of a Cherokee dance, and relapsed into the aforesaid imbecile imprecations, in mixed French and English, on the inhabitants of a world not capable of appreciating him. + 

It was a long time before anything like quiet could be restored; but when it was, Richard addressed the meeting. + 

“Gentlemen, before the unfortunate circumstance which has so long separated us, you knew me, I believe, well, and I am proud to think you esteemed and trusted me.” + 

Did they? Oh, rather. They jingled all the glasses, and broke three in the enthusiastic protestation of an affirmative. + 

“I need not allude to the unhappy accusation of which I have been the victim. You are, I understand, acquainted with the full particulars of my miserable story, and you render me happy by thinking me to be innocent.” + 

By thinking him to be innocent? By knowing him to be innocent! They are so indignant at the bare thought of anybody believing otherwise, that somebody in the doorway, the Smasher himself, growls out something about a⁠—forcible adjective⁠—noise, and the police. + 

“Gentlemen, I have this day regained my liberty; thanks to the exertions of a person to whom I am also indebted for my life, and thanks also to the assistance of my old friend Gus Darley.” + 

Everybody here insisted on shaking hands over again with Gus, which was rather a hindrance to the speaker’s progress; but at last Richard went on⁠— + 

“Now, gentlemen, relying on your friendship” (hear, hear! and another glass broken), “I am about to appeal to you to assist me in the future object of my life. That object will be to discover the real murderer of my uncle, Montague Harding. In what manner, when, or where you may be able to assist me in this, I cannot at present say, but you are all, gentlemen, men of talent.” (More glasses broken, and a good deal of beer spilt into everybody’s boots.) “You are all men of varied experience, of inexhaustible knowledge of the world, and of the life of London. Strange things happen every day of our lives. Who shall say that some one amongst you may not fall, by some strange accident, or let me say rather by the handiwork of Providence, across a clue to this at present entirely unravelled mystery? Promise me, therefore, gentlemen, to give me the benefit of your experience; and whenever that experience throws you into the haunts of bad men, remember that the man I seek may, by some remote chance, be amongst them; and that to find him is the one object of my life. I cannot give you the faintest index to what he may be, or who he may be. He may be dead, and beyond the reach of justice⁠—but he may live! and if he does, Heaven grant that the man who has suffered the stigma of his guilt may track him to his doom. Gentlemen, tell me that your hearts go with me.” + 

They told him so, not once, but a dozen times; shaking hands with him, and pushing divers liquors into his hand every time. But they got over it at last, and the gentleman with the billiard-cue rapped their heads with that instrument to tranquillize them, and then rose as president, and said⁠— + 

“Richard Marwood, our hearts go with you, thoroughly and entirely, and we swear to give you the best powers of our intellects and the utmost strength of our abilities to aid you in your search. Gentlemen, are you prepared to subscribe to this oath?” + 

They were prepared to subscribe to it, and they did subscribe to it, every one of them⁠—rather noisily, but very heartily. + 

When they had done so, a gentleman emerges from the shadow of the doorway, who is no other than the illustrious left-handed one, who had come upstairs in answer to Darley’s summons, just before Richard addressed the Cherokees. The Smasher was not a handsome man. His nose had been broken a good many times, and that hadn’t improved him; he had a considerable number of scars about his face, including almost every known variety of cut, and they didn’t improve him. His complexion, again, bore perhaps too close a resemblance to mottled soap to come within the region of the beautiful; but he had a fine and manly expression of countenance, which, in his amiable moments, reminded the beholder of a benevolent bulldog. + 

He came up to Richard, and took him by the hand. It was no small ordeal of courage to shake hands with the Left-handed Smasher, but Daredevil Dick stood it like a man. + 

“Mr. Richard Marwood,” said he, “you’ve been a good friend to me, ever since you was old enough⁠—” he stopped here, and cast about in his mind for the fitting pursuits of early youth⁠—“ever since you was old enough to give a cove a black eye, or knock your friend’s teeth down his throat with a light backhander. I’ve known you downstairs, a-swearin’ at the barmaid, and holdin’ your own agin the whole lot of the Cheerfuls, when other young gents of your age was a-makin’ themselves bad with sweetstuffs and green apples, and callin’ it life. I’ve known you help that gent yonder,” he gave a jerk with his thumb in the direction of the domino-player, “to wrench off his own pa’s knocker, and send it to him by twopenny post next mornin’, seventeen and sixpence to pay postage; but I never know’d you to do a bad action, or to hit out upon a cove as was down.” + 

Richard thanked the Smasher for his good opinion, and they shook hands again. + 

“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued the host, “I’m a man of few words. If a cove offends me, I give him my left between his eyes, playful; if he does it agen, I give him my left agen, with a meanin’, and he don’t repeat it. If a gent as I like does me proud, I feels grateful, and when I has a chance I shows him my gratitude. Mr. Richard Marwood, I’m your friend to the last spoonful of my claret; and let the man as murdered your uncle keep clear of my left mawley, if he wants to preserve his beauty.” + 

VI + 

Mr. Peters Relates How He Thought He Had a Clue, and How He Lost It + 

A week after the meeting of the Cherokees Richard Marwood received his mother, in a small furnished house he had taken in Spring Gardens. Mrs. Marwood, possessed of the entire fortune of her murdered brother, was a very rich woman. Of her large income she had, during the eight years of her son’s imprisonment, spent scarcely anything; as, encouraged by Mr. Joseph Peters’s mysterious hints and vague promises, she had looked forward to the deliverance of her beloved and only child. The hour had come. She held him in her arms again, free. + 

“No, mother, no,” he says, “not free. Free from the prison walls, but not free from the stain of the false accusation. Not till the hour when all England declares my innocence shall I be indeed a free man. Why, look you, mother, I cannot go out of this room into yonder street without such a disguise as a murderer himself might wear, for fear some Slopperton official should recognise the features of the lunatic criminal, and send me back to my cell at the asylum.” + 

“My darling boy,” she lays her hands upon his shoulders, and looks proudly into his handsome face, “my darling boy, these people at Slopperton think you dead. See,” she touched her black dress as she spoke, “it is for you I wear this. A painful deception, Richard, even for such an object. I cannot bear to think of that river, and of what might have been.” + 

“Dear mother, I have been saved, perhaps, that I may make some atonement for that reckless, wicked past.” + 

“Only reckless, Richard; never wicked. You had always the same noble heart, always the same generous soul; you were always my dear and only son.” + 

“You remember what the young man says in the play, mother, when he gets into a scrape through neglecting his garden and making love to his master’s daughter⁠—‘You shall be proud of your son yet.’ ” + 

“I shall be proud of you, Richard. I am proud of you. We are rich; and wealth is power. Justice shall be done you yet, my darling boy. You have friends⁠—” + 

“Yes, mother, good and true ones. Peters⁠—you brought him with you?” + 

“Yes; I persuaded him to resign his situation. I have settled a hundred a year on him for life⁠—a poor return for what he has done, Richard; but it was all I could induce him to accept, and he only agreed to take that on condition that every moment of his life should be devoted to your service.” + 

“Is he in the house now, mother?” + 

“Yes, he is below; I will ring for him.” + 

“Do, mother. I must go over to Darley, and take him with me. You must not think me an inattentive or neglectful son; but remember that my life has but one business till that man is found.” + 

He wrung her hand, and left her standing at the window watching his receding figure through the quiet dusky street. + 

Her gratitude to Heaven for his restoration is deep and heartfelt; but there is a shade of sadness in her face as she looks out into the twilight after him, and thinks of the eight wasted years of his youth, and of his bright manhood now spent on a chimera; for she thinks he will never find the murderer of his uncle. How, after eight years, without one clue by which to trace him, how can he hope to track the real criminal? + 

But Heaven is above us all, Agnes Marwood; and in the dark and winding paths of life light sometimes comes when and whence we least expect it. + 

If you go straight across Blackfriars Bridge, and do not suffer yourself to be beguiled either by the attractions of that fashionable transpontine lounge, the “New Cut,” or by the eloquence of the last celebrity at that circular chapel some time sacred to Rowland Hill⁠—if you are not a man to be led away by whelks and other piscatorial delicacies, secondhand furniture, birds and birdcages, or easy shaving, you may ultimately reach, at the inland end of the road, a locality known to the inhabitants of the district of Friar Street. Whether, in any dark period of our ecclesiastical history, the members of the mother church were ever reduced to the necessity of living in this neighbourhood I am not prepared to say. But if ever any of the magnates of the Catholic faith did hang out in this direction, it is to be hoped that the odours from the soapboiler’s round the corner, the rich essences from the tallow manufactory over the way, the varied perfumes from the establishment of the gentleman who does a thousand pounds a week in size, to say nothing of such minor and domestic effluvia as are represented by an amalgamation of red herrings, damp corduroy, old boots, onions, washing, a chimney on fire, dead cats, bad eggs, and an open drain or two⁠—it is to be hoped, I say, that these conflicting scents did not pervade the breezes of Friar Street so strongly in the good old times as they do in these our later days of luxury and refinement. + 

Mr. Darley’s establishment, ordinarily spoken of as the surgery par excellence, was perhaps one of the most pretending features of the street. It asserted itself, in fact, with such a redundancy of gilt letters and gas burners, that it seemed to say, “Really now, you must be ill; or if you’re not, you ought to be.” It was not a very large house, this establishment of Mr. Darley’s, but there were at least half-a-dozen bells on the doorpost. There was Surgery; then there was Day and Night (Gus wanted to have Morning and Afternoon, but somebody told him it wasn’t professional); then there was besides surgery, day, and night bells, another brilliant brass knob, inscribed “Visitors,” and a ditto, whereon was engraved “Shop.” Though, as there was only one small back-parlour beyond the shop into which visitors ever penetrated, and as it was the custom for all such visitors to walk straight through the aforesaid shop into the aforesaid parlour without availing themselves of any bell whatever, the brass knobs were looked upon rather in the light of a conventionality than a convenience. + 

But Gus said they looked like business, especially when they were clean, which wasn’t always, as a couple of American gentlemen, friends of Darley’s, were in the habit of squirting tobacco-juice at them from the other side of the way, in the dusky twilight; the man who hit the brass oftenest out of six times to be the winner, and the loser to stand beer all the evening⁠—that is to say, until some indefinite time on the following morning, for Darley’s parties seldom broke up very early; and to let the visitors out and take the morning milk in was often a simultaneous proceeding in the household of our young surgeon. + 

If he had been a surgeon only, he would surely have been a Sir Benjamin Brodie; for when it is taken into account that he could play the piano, organ, guitar, and violoncello, without having learned any of those instruments; that he could write a song, and compose the melody to it; that he could draw horses and dogs after Herring and Landseer; make more puns in one sentence than any burlesque writer living; make love to half-a-dozen women at once, and be believed by every one of them; sing a comic song, or tell a funny story; name the winner of the Derby safer than any prophet on that side of the water; and make his book for the Leger with one hand while he wrote a prescription with the other; the discriminating reader will allow that there was a good deal of some sort of talent or other in the composition of Mr. Augustus Darley. + 

In the twilight of this particular autumn evening he is busily engaged putting up a heap of little packets labelled “Best Epsom Salts,” while his assistant, a very small youth, of a far more elderly appearance than his master, lights the gas. The half-glass door that communicates with the little back parlour is ajar, and Gus is talking to someone within. + 

“If I go over the water tonight, Bell⁠—” he says. + 

A feminine voice from within interrupts him⁠—“But you won’t go tonight, Gus; the last time you went to that horrid Smasher’s, Mrs. Tompkins’s little boy was ill, and they sent into the London Road for Mr. Parker. And you are such a favourite with everybody, dear, that they say if you’d only stay at home always, you’d have the best practice in the neighbourhood.” + 

“But, Bell, how can a fellow stay at home night after night, and perhaps half his time only sell a penn’orth of salts or a poor man’s plaster? If they’d be ill,” he added, almost savagely, “I wouldn’t mind stopping in; there’s some interest in that. Or if they’d come and have their teeth drawn; but they never will: and I’m sure I sell ’em our Infallible Anti-toothache Tincture; and if that don’t make ’em have their teeth out, nothing will.” + 

“Come and have your tea, Gus; and tell Snix to bring his basin.” + 

Snix was the boy, who forthwith drew from a cupboard under the counter the identical basin into which, when a drunken man was brought into the shop, Gus usually bled him, with a double view of obtaining practice in his art and bringing the patient back to consciousness. + 

The feminine occupant of the parlour is a young lady with dark hair and grey eyes, and something under twenty years of age. She is Augustus Darley’s only sister; she keeps his house, and in an emergency she can make up a prescription⁠—nay, has been known to draw a juvenile patient’s first tooth, and give him his money back after the operation for the purchase of consolatory sweetstuffs. + 

Perhaps Isabel Darley is just a little what very prim young ladies, who have never passed the confines of the boarding-school or the drawing-room, might call “fast.” But when it is taken into consideration that she was left an orphan at an early age, that she never went to school in her life, and that she has for a very considerable period been in the habit of associating with her brother’s friends, chiefly members of the Cherokee Society, it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a little more masculine in her attainments, and “go-ahead” in her opinions, than some others of her sex. + 

The parlour is small, as has before been stated. One of the Cherokees has been known to suggest, when there were several visitors present and the time arrived for their departure, that they should be taken out singly with a corkscrew. Other Cherokees, arriving after the room had been filled with visitors, had been heard to advise that somebody should go in first with a candle, to ascertain whether vitality could be sustained in the atmosphere. Perhaps the accommodation was not extended by the character of the furniture, which consisted of a cottage piano, a chair for the purposes of dental surgery, a small Corinthian column supporting a basin with a metal plug and chain useful for like purposes; also a violoncello in the corner, a hanging bookshelf⁠—(which was a torture to tall Cherokees, as one touch from a manly head would tilt down the shelves and shower the contents of Mr. Darley’s library on the head in question, like a literary waterfall)⁠—and a good-sized sofa, with that unmistakable well, and hard back and arms, which distinguish the genus sofa-bedstead. Of course tables, chairs, china ornaments, a plaster-of-Paris bust here and there, caricatures on the walls, a lamp that wouldn’t burn, and a patent arrangement for the manufacture of toasted cheese, are trifles in the way of furniture not worth naming. Miss Darley’s birds, again, though they did spill seed and water into the eyes of unoffending visitors, and drop lumps of dirty sugar sharply down upon the noses of the same, could not of course be considered a nuisance; but certainly the compound surgery and back-parlour in the mansion of Augustus Darley was, to say the least, a little too full of furniture. + 

While Isabel is pouring out the tea, two gentlemen open the shop door, and the bell attached thereto, which should ring but doesn’t, catching in the foremost visitor’s foot, nearly precipitates him headlong into the emporium of the disciple of Esculapius. This foremost visitor is no other than Mr. Peters, and the tall figure behind him, wrapped in a greatcoat, is Daredevil Dick. + 

“Here I am, Gus!” he cries out, in his own bold hearty voice; “here I am; found your place at last, in spite of the fascinations of half the stale shellfish in the United Kingdom. Here I am; and here’s the best friend I have in the world, not even excepting yourself, old fellow.” + 

Gus introduces Richard to his sister Isabel, who has been taught from her childhood to look upon the young man shut up in a lunatic asylum down at Slopperton as the greatest hero, next to Napoleon Bonaparte, that ever the world had boasted. She was a little girl of eleven years old at the time of Dick’s trial, and had never seen her wild brother’s wilder companion; and she looks up now at the dark handsome face with a glance of almost reverence in her deep gray eyes. But Bell is by no means a heroine; and she has a dozen unheroine-like occupations. She has the tea to pour out, and in her nervous excitement she scalds Richard’s fingers, drops the sugar into the slop-basin, and pours all the milk into one cup of tea. What she would have done without the assistance of Mr. Peters, it is impossible to say; for that gentleman showed himself the very genius of order; cut thin bread-and-butter enough for half-a-dozen, which not one of the party touched; refilled the teapot before it was empty; lit the gas-lamp which hung from the ceiling; shut the door which communicated with the shop and the other door which led on to the staircase; and did all so quietly that nobody knew he was doing anything. + 

Poor Richard! In spite of the gratitude and happiness he feels in his release, there is a gloom upon his brow and an abstraction in his manner, which he tries in vain to shake off. + 

A small, round, chubby individual, who might be twelve or twenty, according to the notions of the person estimating her age, removed the tea-tray, and in so doing broke a saucer. Gus looked up. “She always does it,” he said, mildly. “We’re getting quite accustomed to the sound. It rather reduces our stock of china, and we sometimes are obliged to send out to buy tea-things before we can have any breakfast; but she’s a good girl, and she doesn’t steal the honey, or the jujubes, or the tartaric acid out of the seidlitz-powders, as the other one did; not that I minded that much,” he continued; “but she couldn’t read, and she sometimes filled up the papers with arsenic for fear of being found out; and that might have been inconvenient, if we’d ever happened to sell them.” + 

“Now, Gus,” said Richard, as he drew his chair up to the fireplace and lit his pipe⁠—permission being awarded by Bell, who lived in one perpetual atmosphere of tobacco-smoke⁠—“now, Gus, I want Peters to tell you all about this affair; how it was he thought me innocent; how he hit upon the plan he formed for saving my neck; how he tried to cast about and find a clue to the real murderer; how he thought he had found a clue, and how he lost it.” + 

“Shall my sister stop while he tells the story?” asked Gus. + 

“She is your sister, Gus,” answered Richard. “She cannot be so unlike you as not to be a true and pitying friend to me. Miss Darley,” he continued, turning towards her as he spoke, “you do not think me quite so bad a fellow as the world has made me out; you would like to see me righted, and my name freed from the stain of a vile crime?” + 

“Mr. Marwood,” the girl answered, in an earnest voice, “I have heard your sad story again and again from my brother’s lips. Had you too been my brother, I could not, believe me, have felt a deeper interest in your fate, or a truer sorrow for your misfortunes. It needs but to look into your face, or hear your voice, to know how little you deserve the imputation that has been cast upon you.” + 

Richard rises and gives her his hand. No languid and ladylike pressure, such as would not brush the down off a butterfly’s wing, but an honest hearty grasp, that comes straight from the heart. + 

“And now for Mr. Peters’s story,” said Gus, “while I brew a jugful of whisky-punch.” + 

“You can follow his hands, Gus?” asks Richard. + 

“Every twist and turn of them. He and I had many a confab about you, old fellow, before we went out fishing,” said Gus, looking up from the pleasing occupation of peeling a lemon. + 

“Now for it, then,” said Richard; and Mr. Peters accordingly began. + 

Perhaps, considering his retiring from the Slopperton police force a great event, not to say a crisis, in his life, Mr. Peters had celebrated it by another event; and, taking the tide of his affairs at the flood, had availed himself of the water to wash his hands with. At any rate, the digital alphabet was a great deal cleaner than when, eight years ago, he spelt out the two words, “Not guilty,” in the railway carriage. + 

There was something very strange to a looker-on in the little party, Gus, Richard, and Bell, all with earnest eyes fixed on the active fingers of the detective⁠—the silence only broken by some exclamation at intervals from one of the three. + 

“When first I see this young gent,” say the fingers, as Mr. Peters designates Richard with a jerk of his elbow, “I was a-standin’ on the other side of the way, a-waitin’ till my superior, Jinks, as was as much up to his business as a kitting,”⁠—(Mr. Peters has rather what we may call a fancy style of orthography, and takes the final g off some words to clap it on to others, as his taste dictates)⁠—“a-waitin’, I say, till Jinks should want my assistance. Well, gents all⁠—beggin’ the lady’s parding, as sits up so manly, with none of yer faintin’ nor ’steriky games, as I a’most forgot she was a lady⁠—no sooner did I clap eyes upon Mr. Marwood here, a-smokin’ his pipe, in Jinks’s face, and a-answerin’ him sharp, and a-behavin’ what you may call altogether cocky, than I says to myself, ‘They’ve got the wrong un’. My fust words and my last about this ’ere gent, was, ‘They’ve got the wrong un.’ ” + 

Mr. Peters looked round at the attentive party with a glance of triumph, rubbed his hands by way of a full-stop, and went on with his manual recital. + 

“For why?” said the fingers, interrogatively, “for why did I think as this ’ere gent was no good for this ’ere murder; for why did I think them chaps at Slopperton had got on the wrong scent? Because he was cheeky? Lor’ bless your precious eyes, miss” (by way of gallantry he addresses himself here to Isabel), “not a bit of it! When a cove goes and cuts another cove’s throat offhand, it ain’t likely he ain’t prepared to cheek a police-officer. But when I reckoned up this young gent’s face, what was it I see? Why, as plain as I see his nose and his moustachios⁠—and he ain’t bad off for neither of them,” said the fingers, parenthetically⁠—“I see that he hadn’t done it. Now, a cove what’s screwed up to face a judge and jury, maybe can face ’em, and never change a line of his mug; but there isn’t a cove an lives as can stand that first tap of a detective’s hand upon his shoulder as tells him, plain as words, ‘The game is up.’ The best of ’em, and the pluckiest of ’em, drops under that. If they keeps the colour in their face⁠—which some of ’em has got the power to do, and none as never tried it on can guess the pain⁠—if they can do that ’ere, the perspiration breaks out wet and cold upon their for’eds, and that blows ’em. But this young gent⁠—he was took aback, he was surprised, and he was riled, and used bad language; but his colour never changed, and he wasn’t once knocked over till Jinks, unbusiness-like, told him of his uncle’s murder, when he turned as white as that ’ere ’ed of Bon‑er‑part.” Mr. Peters, for want of a better comparison, glanced in the direction of a bust of the victor of Marengo, which, what with tobacco-smoke and a ferocious pair of burnt cork moustachios, was by no means the whitest object in creation. + 

“Now, what a detective officer’s good at, if he’s worth his salt, is this ’ere: when he sees two here and another two there, he can put ’em together, though they might be a mile apart to anybody not up to the trade, and make ’em into four. So, thinks I, the gent isn’t took aback at bein’ arrested; but he is took aback when he hears as how his uncle’s murdered. Now, if he’d committed the murder, he’d know of it; and he might sham surprise, but he wouldn’t be surprised; and this young gent was knocked all of a heap as genuine as⁠—” Mr. Peters’s ideas still revert to the bust of Napoleon⁠—“as ever that ’ere forring cove was, when he sees his old guard scrunched up small at the battle of Waterloo.” + 

“Heaven knows, Peters,” said Richard, taking his pipe out of his mouth, and looking up from his stooping position over the fire, “Heaven knows you were right; I did feel my heart turn cold when I heard of that good man’s death.” + 

“Well, that they’d got the wrong un I saw was as clear as daylight⁠—but where was the right un? That was the question! Who ever committed the murder did it for the money in that ’ere cabinet: and sold agen they was, whoever they was, and didn’t get the money. Who was in the house? This young gent’s mother and the servant. I was nobody in the Gardenford force, and I was less than nobody at Slopperton; so get into that house at the Black Mill I couldn’t. This young gent was walked off to jail and I was sent about my business⁠—my orders bein’ to be back in Gardenford that evenin’, leavin’ Slopperton by the three-thirty train. Well, I was a little cut up about this young gent; for I seed that the case was dead agen him; the money in his pocket⁠—the blood on his sleeve⁠—a cock-and-a-bull story of a letter of introduction, and a very evident attempt at a bolt⁠—only enough to hang him, that’s all; and, for all that, I had a inward conwiction that he was as hinnercent of the murder as that ’ere plaster-of-Paris stattur.” Mr. Peters goes regularly to the bust for comparisons, by way of saving time and trouble in casting about for fresh ones. + 

“But my orders,” continued the fingers, “was positive, so I goes down to the station to start by the three-thirty; and as I walks into the station-yard, I hears the whistle, and sees the train go. I was too late; and as the next train didn’t start for near upon three hours, I thought I’d take a stroll and ’av a look at the beauties of Slopperton. Well, I strolls on, promiscuous like, till I comes to the side of a jolly dirty-looking river; and as by this time I feels a little dry, I walks on, lookin’ about for a public; but ne’er a one do I see, till I almost tumbles into a dingy little place, as looked as if it did about half-a-pint a day reg’lar, when business was brisk. But in I walks, past the bar; and straight afore me I sees a door as leads into the parlour. The passage was jolly dark; and this ’ere door was ajar; and inside I hears voices. Well, you see, business is business, and pleasure is pleasure; but when a cove takes a pleasure in his business, he gets a way of lettin’ his business habits come out unbeknownst when he’s takin’ his pleasure: so I listens. Now, the voice I heerd fust was a man’s voice; and, though the place was a sort of crib such as nobody but navvies or suchlike would be in the habit of going to, this ’ere was the voice of a gentleman. I can’t say as I ever paid much attention to grammar myself, though I daresay it’s very pleasant and amusin’ when you enter into it; but, for all that, I’d knocked about in the world long enough to know a gent’s way of speakin’ from a navvy’s, as well as I know’d one tune on the accordion from another tune. It was a nice, soft-spoken voice too, and quite melodious and pleasant to listen to; but it was a-sayin’ some of the cruelest and hardest words as ever was spoke to a woman yet by any creature with the cheek to call hisself a man. You’re not much good, my friend, says I, with your lardy-dardy ways and your cold-blooded words, whoever you are. You’re a thin chap, with light hair and white hands, I know, though I’ve never seen you; and there’s very little in the way of wickedness that you wouldn’t be up to on a push. Now, just as I was a-thinkin’ this, he said somethin’ that sent the blood up into my face as hot as fire⁠—‘I expected a sum of money, and I’ve been disappointed of it,’ he said; and before the girl he was a-talkin’ to could open her lips, he caught her up sudden⁠—‘Never you mind how,’ he says, ‘never you mind how.’ + 

“He expected a sum of money, and he’d been disappointed of it! So had the man who had murdered this young gent’s uncle. + 

“Not much in this, perhaps. But why was he so frightened at the thoughts of her asking him how he expected the money, and how he’d bin disappointed? There it got fishy. At any rate, says I to myself, I’ll have a look at you, my friend; so in I walks, very quiet and quite unbeknownst. He was a-sittin’ with his back to the door, and the young woman he was a-talkin’ to was standin’ lookin’ out of the winder; so neither of ’em saw me. He was buildin’ up some cards into a ’ouse, and had got ’em up very high, when I laid my hand upon his shoulder sudden. He turned round and looked at me.” Mr. Peters’ hero paused, and looked round at the little group, who sat watching his fingers with breathless attention. He had evidently come to a point in his narrative. + 

“Now, what did I see in his face when he looked at me? Why, the very same look that I missed in the face of this young gent when Jinks took him in the mornin’. The very same look that I’d seen in a many faces, and never know’d it differ, whether it came one way or another, always bein’ the same look at bottom⁠—the look of a man as is guilty of what will hang him and thinks that he’s found out. But as you can’t give looks in as evidence, this wasn’t no good in a practical way; but I says to myself, if ever there was anything certain in this world since it was begun, I’ve come across the right un: so I sits down and takes up a newspaper. I signified to him that I was dumb, and he took it for granted that I was deaf as well⁠—which was one of those stupid mistakes your clever chaps sometimes fall into⁠—so he went on a-talking to the girl. + 

“Well, it was a old story enough, what him and the girl was talkin’ of; but every word he said made him out a more cold-blooded villain than the last. + 

“Presently he offered her some money⁠—four sovereigns. She served him as he ought to have been served, and threw them every one slap in his face. One cut him over the eye; and I was glad of it. ‘You’re marked, my man,’ thinks I, ‘and nothin’ could be handier agen I want you.’ He picked up three of the sovereigns, but for all he could do he couldn’t find the fourth. So he had the cut (which was a jolly deep un) plastered up, and he went away. She stared at the river uncommon hard, and then she went away. Now I didn’t much like the look she gave the river, so as I had about half an hour to spare before the train started, I followed her. I think she knew it; for presently she turned short off into a little street, and when I turned into it after her she wasn’t to be seen right or left. + 

“Well, I had but half an hour, so I thought it was no use chasin’ this unfortunate young creature through all the twistings and turnings of the back slums of Slopperton; so after a few minutes’ consideration, I walked straight to the station. Hang me if I wasn’t too late for the train again. I don’t know how it was but I couldn’t keep my mind off the young woman, nor keep myself from wonderin’ what she was a-goin’ to do with herself, and what she was a-goin’ to do with that ’ere baby. So I walks back agen down by the water, and as I’d a good hour and a half to spare, I walks a good way, thinking of the young man, and the cut on his forehead. It was nigh upon dark by this time, and foggy into the bargain. Maybe I’d gone a mile or more, when I comes up to a barge what lay at anchor quite solitary. It was a collier, and there was a chap on board, sittin’ in the stern, smokin’, and lookin’ at the water. There was no one else in sight but him and me; and no sooner does he spy me comin’ along the bank than he sings out⁠— + 

“ ‘Hulloa! Have you met a young woman down that way?’ + 

“His words struck me all of a heap somehow, comin’ so near upon what I was a-thinkin’ of myself. I shook my head; and he said⁠— + 

“ ‘There’s been some unfort’nate young girl down here tryin’ to dround her baby. I see the little chap in the water, and fished him out with my boat-hook. I’d seen the girl hangin’ about here, just as it was a-gettin’ dark, and then I heard the splash when she threw the child in; but the fog was too thick for me to see anything ashore by that time.’ + 

“The barge was just alongside the bank, and I stepped on board. Not bein’ so fortunate as to have a voice, you know, it comes awkward with strangers, and I was rather put to it to get on with the young man. And didn’t he sing out loud when he came to understand I was dumb; he couldn’t have spoke in a higher key if I’d been a forriner. + 

“He told me he should take the baby round to the Union; all he hoped he said, was, that the mother wasn’t a-goin’ to do anything bad with herself. + 

“I hoped not too; but I remembered that look of hers when she stood at the window staring out at the river, and I didn’t feel very easy in my mind about her. + 

“I took the poor little wet thing up in my arms. The young man had wrapped it in an old jacket, and it was a-cryin’ piteous, and lookin’, oh, so scared and miserable. + 

“Well, it may seem a queer whim, but I’m rather softhearted on the subject of babies, and often had a thought that I should like to try the power of cultivation in the way of business, and bring a child up from the very cradle to the police detective line, to see whether I couldn’t make that ’ere child a ornament to the force. I wasn’t a marryin’ man, and by no means likely ever to ’av a family of my own; so when I took up that ’ere baby in my arms, somehow or other the thought came into my ’ed of adoptin’ him, and bringin’ of him up. So I rolled him up in my greatcoat, and took him with me to Gardenford.” + 

“And a wonderful boy he is,” said Richard; “we’ll educate him, Peters, and make a gentleman of him.” + 

“Wait a bit,” said the fingers very quickly; “thank you kindly, sir; but if the police force of this ’ere country was robbed of that ’ere boy, it would be robbed of a gem as it couldn’t afford to lose.” + 

“Go on, Peters; tell them the rest of your story.” + 

“Well, though I felt in my own mind that by one of those strange chances which does happen in life, maybe as often as they happen in storybooks, I had fallen across the man who had committed the murder, yet for all that I hadn’t evidence enough to get a hearin’. I got transferred from Gardenford to Slopperton, and every leisure minute I had I tried to come across the man I’d marked; but nowhere could I see him, or hear of anyone answering his description. I went to the churches; for I thought him capable of anything, even to shammin’ pious. I went to the theayter, and I see a young woman accused of poisonin’ a fam’ly, and proved innocent by a police cove as didn’t know his business any more than a fly. I went anywhere and everywhere, but I never see that man; and it was gettin’ uncommon near the trial of this young gent, and nothin’ done. How was he to be saved? I thought of it by night and thought of it by day; but work it out I couldn’t nohow. One day I hears of an old friend of the pris’ner’s being sup‑boned‑aed as witness for the crown. This friend I determined to see; for two ’eds”⁠—Mr. Peters looked round, as though he defied contradiction⁠—“shall be better than one.” + 

“And this friend,” said Gus, “was your humble servant; who was only too glad to find that poor Dick had one sincere friend in the world who believed in his innocence, besides myself.” + 

“Well, Mr. Darley and me,” resumed Mr. Peters, “put our ’eds together, and we came to this conclusion, that if this young gent was mad when he committed the murder, they couldn’t hang him, but would shut him in a asylum for the rest of his nat’ral life⁠—which mayn’t be pleasant in the habstract, but which is better than hangin’, any day.” + 

“So you determined on proving me mad,” said Richard. + 

“We hadn’t such very bad grounds to go upon, perhaps, old fellow,” replied Mr. Darley; “that brain-fever, which we thought such a misfortune when it laid you up for three dreary weeks stood us in good stead; we had something to go upon, for we knew we could get you off by no other means. But to get you off this way we wanted your assistance, and we didn’t hit upon the plan till it was too late to get at you and tell you our scheme; we didn’t hit upon it till twelve o’clock on the night before your trial. We tried to see your counsel; but he had that morning left the town, and wasn’t to return till the trial came on. Peters hung about the court all the morning, but couldn’t see him; and nothing was done when the judge and jury took their seats. You know the rest; how Peters caught your eye⁠—” + 

“Yes,” said Dick, “and how seven letters upon his fingers told me the whole scheme, and gave me my cue; those letters formed these two words, ‘Sham mad.’ ” + 

“And very well you did it at the short notice, Dick,” said Gus; “upon my word, for the moment I was almost staggered, and thought, suppose in getting up this dodge we are only hitting upon the truth, and the poor fellow really has been driven out of his wits by this frightful accusation?” + 

“A scrap of paper,” said Mr. Peters, on his active fingers, “gave the hint to your counsel⁠—a sharp chap enough, though a young un.” + 

“I can afford to reward him now for his exertions,” said Richard, “and I must find him for that purpose. But Peters, for heaven’s sake tell us about this young man whom you suspect to be the murderer. If I go to the end of the world in search of him, I’ll find him, and drag him and his villainy to light, that my name may be cleared from the foul stain it wears.” + 

Mr. Peters looked very grave. “You must go a little further than the end of this world to find him, I’m afraid, sir,” said the fingers. “What do you say to looking for him in the next? for that’s the station he’d started for when I last saw him; and I believe that on that line, with the exception of now and then a cock-and-a-bull-lane ghost, they don’t give no return tickets.” + 

“Dead?” said Richard. “Dead, and escaped from justice?” + 

“That’s about the size of it, sir,” replied Mr. Peters. “Whether he thought as how something was up, and he was blown, or whether he was riled past bearin’ at findin’ no money in that ’ere cabinet, I can’t take upon myself to say; but I found him six months after the murder out upon a heath, dead, with a laudanum-bottle a-lying by his side.” + 

“And did you ever find out who he was?” asked Gus. + 

“He was a usher, sir, at a ’cademy for young gents, and a very pious young man he was too, I’ve heard; but for all that he murdered this young gent’s uncle, or my name isn’t Peters.” + 

“Beyond the reach of justice,” said Richard; “then the truth can never be brought to light, and to the end of my days I must bear the stigma of a crime of which I am innocent.” + 