nge he found the new farthing still there and a
sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering speculation.
Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of the species. Either
he would vanish, a thief stealing a coin; or he would sneak back with
it virtuously, a snob seeking a reward. In the middle of that night Lord
Glengyle was knocked up out of his bed--for he lived alone--and forced
to open the door to the deaf idiot. The idiot brought with him, not
the sovereign, but exactly nineteen shillings and eleven-pence
three-farthings in change.

"Then the wild exactitude of this action took hold of the mad lord's
brain like fire. He swore he was Diogenes, that had long sought an
honest man, and at last had found one. He made a new will, which I have
seen. He took the literal youth into his huge, neglected house, and
trained him up as his solitary servant and--after an odd manner--his
heir. And whatever that queer creature understands, he understood
absolutely his lord's two fixed ideas: first, that the letter of right
is everything; and second, that he himself was to have the gold of
Glengyle. So far, that is all; and that is simple. He has stripped the
house of gold, and taken not a grain that was not gold; not so much as
a grain of snuff. He lifted the gold leaf off an old illumination, fully
satisfied that he left the rest unspoilt. All that I understood; but I
could not understand this skull business. I was really uneasy about that
human head buried among the potatoes. It distressed me--till Flambeau
said the word.

"It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the grave, when he
has taken the gold out of the tooth."

And, indeed, when Flambeau crossed the hill that morning, he saw that
strange being, the just miser, digging at the desecrated grave, the
plaid round his throat thrashing out in the mountain wind; the sober top
hat on his head.

The Wrong Shape

Certain of the great roads going north out of London continue far into
the country a sort of attenuated and interrupted spectre of a street,
with great gaps in the building, but preserving the line. Here will be a
group of shops, followed by a fenced field or paddock, and then a famous
public-house, and then perhaps a market garden or a nursery garden, and
then one large private house, and then another field and another inn,
and so on. If anyone walks along one of these roads he will pass a house
which will probably catch his e