“No harm in seeing. I don’t charge any of you, but I may just say that you are as safe in your seats there, as you could be if you had wings and used them. I have friends at the door, so—quiet. Sim, I want to speak with you in the other room. Get a candle.”
All authority lies in bearing. The man obeyed like a machine, got his dip lighted, and followed me into the small room, (there were only two in the house,) when I took the light from him, with the intention of looking into hidden places, but there was strangely enough no necessity for searching. There before me stood a huge trunk or box, more like a coal bunker or ship’s locker than a chest, and sufficient to have held within its capacious sides a jeweller’s stock. Knocking my foot against it, and finding it heavy with contents,
“Why,” said I, “how comes this to be here?”
“All right,” replied the man; “nothing of yours there.”
“Let me see,” said I. “Get me the key.”
“The key is with the proprietor,” said he, coolly. “Why you know, sir, it’s an emigrant’s box that there, and he has merely left it with me till the ship sails, when he will return for it—all right.”
“And there’s nothing in it belonging to these gentry in the kitchen?”
“Not a handkerchief.”
“Well,” said I, “as I don’t wish this trunk to emigrate before I know what’s inside, I will break it open.”
And going into the kitchen, I seized a big salamander, standing by the fire, and without saying a word to the no doubt wondering company, who were working hard to look easy, I returned to the room. Up to this kind of work, I managed, by getting a lever point for my poker, to send the top of the box in splinters in a very few minutes, but with a crash which, like the laughter of my friends in the kitchen, had more sound than music in it. And lo! there was a sight—a veritable curiosity box—a bazaar in miniature; in short, as I afterwards ascertained, all the valuables abstracted not only from the house in Minto Street, but from that in Claremont Crescent, had been brought together, as if by the hand of Prospero’s little friend, for my gratification, and yet with no bidding from me.