Later.—Appear to be in a Police cell! Why don't they shut up the keyhole to prevent those gamboge-coloured elephants getting through? Why has the Warder fifteen heads? Shall complain to the Home Secretary. Also shall make it hot for that Enthusiast when I get out.
THE ADVENTURES OF PICKLOCK HOLES.
(By Cunnin Toil.)
No. IV.—THE ESCAPE OF THE BULL-DOG.
I think I have mentioned that the vast intellect of my friend Holes took as great a delight in unravelling the petty complexities of some slight secret as in tracing back to its source the turbid torrent of a crime that had set all Europe ablaze. Nothing, in fact, was too small for this great man; he lived only to unravel; his days and nights were spent in deciphering criminal cryptograms. Many and many a time have I said to him, "Holes, you ought to marry, and train up an offspring of detective marvels. It is a sin to allow such a genius as yours to remain unreproduced." But he only smiled at me in his calm, impassive, unmuscular, and unemotional manner, and put me off with some such phrase as, "I am wedded to my art," or, "Detection is my wife; she loves, honours, and obeys me—qualities I could never find in a mate of flesh and blood." I merely mention these trifles in order to give my readers some further insight into the character of a remarkable man with whom it was my privilege to be associated on more than one occasion during those investigations of which the mere account has astonished innumerable Continents.
During the early Summer of the year before last a matter of scientific research took me to Cambridge. It will be remembered that at that time an obscure disease had appeared in London, and had claimed many victims. Careful study had convinced me that this illness, the symptoms of which were sudden fear, followed by an inclination to run away, and ending in complete prostration, were due to the presence in the blood of what is now known as the Proctor Bacillus, so called on account of two white patches on its chest, which had all the appearance of the bands worn by the Proctor during the discharge of his unpleasant constabulary functions in the streets and purlieus of University towns. In order to carry on my investigations at the very fountainhead, as it were, I had accepted a long-standing invitation from my old friend Colonel the Reverend Henry Bagnet, who not only commanded the Cambridge University Volunteers, but was, in addition, one of the most distinguished scholarly ornaments of the great College of St. Baldred's.
On the evening to which my story relates we had dined together in the gorgeous mess-room which custom and the liberality of the University authorities have consecrated to the use of the gallant corps whose motto of "Quis jaculatur scarabæum?" has been borne triumphantly in the van of many a review on the Downs of Brighton and elsewhere. The countless delicacies appropriate to the season, the brilliant array of grey uniforms, the heavy gold plate which loaded the oak side-board, the choice vintages of France and Germany, all these had combined with the clank of swords, the jingle of spurs, the emphatic military words of command uttered by light-hearted undergraduates, and the delightful semi-military, semi-clerical anecdotes of that old war-dog, Colonel Bagnet, to make up a memorable evening in the experience of a careworn medical practitioner who had left the best part of his health and his regulation overalls on the bloody battle-field of Tantia-Tee, in the Afghan jungle.
Colonel Bagnet had just ordered the head mess-waiter to produce six more bottles of the famous "die-hard" port, laid down by his predecessor in the command during the great town and gown riots of 1870. In these terrible civic disturbances the University Volunteers, as most men of middle age will remember, specially distinguished themselves by the capture and immediate execution of the truculent Mayor of Cambridge, who was the prime mover in the commotion. The wine was circulating freely, and conversation was flowing with all the verve and abandon that mark the intercourse of undergraduates with dons. Just as I was congratulating the Colonel on the excellence of his port the door opened, and a man of forbidding aspect, clothed in the heavy garments of a mathematical moderator, entered the mess-room.