ur, during
which Curlydown was hurrying through his work, and Bagwax was meditating
whether it was certainly his duty to make known the facts as to the
postage-stamp. 'You are so unkind,' said Bagwax at last, in a tone of
injured friendship, burning to tell his new discovery.

'You have got it all your way,' said Curlydown, without lifting his
head. 'And then, as you said just now,--I don't understand.'

'I'd tell you everything if you'd only be a little less hard.'

Curlydown was envious. He had, of course, been told of the civil things
which Sir John Joram had said; and though he did not quite believe all,
he was convinced that Bagwax was supposed to have distinguished himself.
If there was anything to be known he would like to know it. Nor was he
naturally quarrelsome. Bagwax was his old friend. 'I don't mean to be
hard,' he said. 'Of course one does feel oneself fretted when one has
been obliged to miss two trains.'

'Can I lend a hand?' said Bagwax.

'It doesn't signify now. I can't catch anything before the 5.20. One
does expect to get away a little earlier than that on a Saturday. What
is it that you've found out?'

'Do you really care to know?'

'Of course I do,--if it's anything in earnest. I took quite as much
interest as you in the matter when we were down at Cambridge.'

'You see that postage-stamp?' Bagwax stretched out the envelope,--or
rather the photograph of the envelope, for it was no more. But the
Queen's head, with all its obliterating smudges, and all its marks and
peculiarities, were to be seen quite as plainly as on the original,
which was tied up carefully among the archives of the trial. 'You see
that postage-stamp?' Curlydown took his glass, and looked at the
document, and declared that he saw the postage-stamp very plainly.

'But it does not tell you anything particular?'

'Nothing very particular--at the first glance,' said Curlydown, gazing
through the glass with all his eyes.

'Look again.'

'I see that they obliterate out there with a kind of star.'

'That has nothing to do with it.'

'The bunch of hair at the back of the head isn't quite like our bunch of
hair.'

'Just the same;--taken from the same die,' said Bagwax.

'The little holes for dividing the stamps are bigger.'

'It isn't that.'

'Then what the d---- is it?'

'There are letters at every corner,' said Bagwax.

'That's of course,' said Curlydown.

'Can you read those letters?' Curlydown owned that he n