Four bits of old bootlace.
A broken strap.
A screw eye.
A paper, containing a mouldy empty cardboard box for Marcham’s Patent Trouser Buttons, with the legend, “No more sewing.”
Most of a pair of drill riding breeks made in Taunton. The ants had been in these. Two envelopes, or parts of envelopes.
A sodden little fat book, rather like a newly-drowned puppy.
He brought this book into the light, so that he might examine it. It proved to be a dumpy volume of Milton’s poems, complete in itself, “printed 1828 for J. Smith, Bookseller, 193, High Holborn,” and bound in green cloth boards. It opened at the frontispiece, of Milton “from an Impression of a Seal,” opposite a vignette of Eve among some dahlias beside a very wriggly snake. On the flyleaf of the book was an inscription in faint ink in the handwriting of a woman:
To Dudley Wigmore,
from his Mother. August 12th, 1881.
“Dudley Wigmore,” Hi said. “D. W. . . . So that is the fellow’s name, is it? It is an odd book for him to have. And he might have been a little more careful of a gift from his mother, one would think.”