has no relations living now. When he dies he proposes to leave
the Plimsoll Collection to the nation, having--as far as he can
foresee--no particular use for it in the next world. This is really very
generous of him, and no doubt, when the time comes, the papers will say
so. But it is a pity that he cannot be appreciated properly in his
lifetime. Personally I should like to see him knighted.

THE ADVENTURER

Lionel Norwood, from his earliest days, had been marked out for a life
of crime. When quite a child he was discovered by his nurse killing
flies on the window-pane. This was before the character of the house-fly
had become a matter of common talk among scientists, and Lionel (like
all great men, a little before his time) had pleaded hygiene in vain. He
was smacked hastily and bundled off to a preparatory school, where his
aptitude for smuggling sweets would have lost him many a half-holiday
had not his services been required at outside-left in the hockey eleven.
With some difficulty he managed to pass into Eton, and three years
later--with, one would imagine, still more difficulty--managed to get
superannuated. At Cambridge he went down-hill rapidly. He would think
nothing of smoking a cigar in academical costume, and on at least one
occasion he drove a dogcart on Sunday. No wonder that he was requested,
early in his second year, to give up his struggle with the Little-go and
betake himself back to London.

London is always glad to welcome such people as Lionel Norwood. In no
other city is it so simple for a man of easy conscience to earn a living
by his wits. If Lionel ever had any scruples (which, after a perusal of
the above account of his early days, it may be permitted one to doubt)
they were removed by an accident to his solicitor, who was run over in
the Argentine on the very day that he arrived there with what was left
of Lionel's money. Reduced suddenly to poverty, Norwood had no choice
but to enter upon a life of crime.

Except, perhaps, that he used slightly less hair-oil than most, he
seemed just the ordinary man about town as he sat in his dressing-gown
one fine summer morning and smoked a cigarette. His rooms were furnished
quietly and in the best of taste. No signs of his nefarious profession
showed themselves to the casual visitor. The appealing letters from the
Princess whom he was blackmailing, the wire apparatus which shot the two
of spades down his sleeve during the coon-can nights at