ever seen, and his face was as pallid as his collar. He carried a
loose key, with which he unlocked a door a little way along the
passage, and so ushered us into that dreadful repository which perhaps
has fewer visitors than any other of equal interest in the world. The
place was cold as the inviolate vault; blinds had to be drawn up, and
glass cases uncovered, before we could see a thing except the row of
murderers' death-masks--the placid faces with the swollen necks--that
stood out on their shelves to give us ghostly greeting.

"This fellow isn't formidable," whispered Raffles, as the blinds went
up; "still, we can't be too careful. My little lot are round the
corner, in the sort of recess; don't look till we come to them in their
turn."

So we began at the beginning, with the glass case nearest the door; and
in a moment I discovered that I knew far more about its contents than
our pallid guide. He had some enthusiasm, but the most inaccurate
smattering of his subject. He mixed up the first murderer with quite
the wrong murder, and capped his mistake in the next breath with an
intolerable libel on the very pearl of our particular tribe.

"This revawlver," he began, "belonged to the celebrited burgular,
Chawles Peace. These are his spectacles, that's his jimmy, and this
here knife's the one that Chawley killed the policeman with."

Now I like accuracy for its own sake, strive after it myself, and am
sometimes guilty of forcing it upon others. So this was more than I
could pass.

"That's not quite right," I put in mildly. "He never made use of the
knife."

The young clerk twisted his head round in its vase of starch.

"Chawley Peace killed two policemen," said he.

"No, he didn't; only one of them was a policeman; and he never killed
anybody with a knife."

The clerk took the correction like a lamb. I could not have refrained
from making it, to save my skin. But Raffles rewarded me with as
vicious a little kick as he could administer unobserved. "Who was
Charles Peace?" he inquired, with the bland effrontery of any judge
upon the bench.

The clerk's reply came pat and unexpected. "The greatest burgular we
ever had," said he, "till good old Raffles knocked him out!"

"The greatest of the pre-Raffleites," the master murmured, as we passed
on to the safer memorials of mere murder. There were misshapen bullets
and stained knives that had taken human life; there were lithe, lean
ropes which had ret