“Yes; I thought it had been done by a rat!”
“Very strange sort of work for a rat! Do you see what regular little circles he has traced on the wall?”
“True; but what of it?”
“Every effect has a cause; that is what I am seeking. Did you not say that among the sounds you had heard there was a scratching?”
“Yes; a grinding, as if of some tool.”
“Well, do you know what I think it was? Some feeble or unskilful hand trying to break a hole in the wall, and look through.”
“It must have been with a nail, then, or something still smaller, for the scratch in the plaster is certainly not more than two lines deep.”
“Not so much; and yet it has been cut into perseveringly in many places.”
“Stenson may have made those marks, to fix in his mind something or other that he did not choose to write down. Come, you must know how to decipher all sorts of lapidary inscriptions.”
“I know enough to say that it is no inscription, and belongs to no known language. I hold to my idea, that it was an attempt to pierce the wall. See, in each place there is a small hole with bevelled edges, made with a blunt instrument, and around it a circle, scratched into the white of the plaster, as if a pair of scissors had been used, after the fashion of a pair of dividers, but with one prong—that serving as the feeble support—broken.”