As he spoke, the doctor advanced to the bell-rope. He walked with his back toward the door, and as he did so my old friend Jack, the magpie, came hop-hop-hopping in, and his thievish eye at once fell upon the silver specs, which the enraged man had laid down on the very spot on the table where before he had laid the case which had so disgraced me in his eyes.
Jack quietly hopped upon his old quarters in the armchair and as quickly possessed himself of the envied trophy, and I became the innocent witness of another theft much greater than the last.
Deeper disgrace to me, I thought; but as the doctor was evidently sure I was the culprit, and was not likely to accept any explanation from me, I thought it best to keep quiet, though by this I no doubt made myself Jack’s accessory.
A servant answered the bell, and he was requested to send my father hither, and, of course, my father came.
“Well, doctor, what can I have the pleasure of doing for you?” he inquired. “You appear agitated—what is the matter?”
“Look here, sir, if you please,” said the doctor to my father. “I laid my spectacle-case on the table where you see my glasses,” and here he pointed to the table, and my father looked on the spot indicated, and said:
“Where, doctor, where? I see no glasses.”
We were all standing some distance from the table, and the doctor could not see what was on it; he only spoke from the knowledge that he had placed his spectacles on the table, to which he now drew near, when, to his great surprise, and to my greater amusement, he made the same discovery that my father had done, that there were no glasses there.
“Why, sir, not five minutes ago I laid my glasses on this spot!” he exclaimed, giving the table rather a loud rap with his knuckles, which did not harm the table, though it did the knuckles, as the doctor’s screwed-up face indicated. “There, sir, exactly there—and now you see with your own eyes that both case and spectacles are gone!”
“It is a very mysterious occurrence, Dr. Millbank,” remarked my father.