ertainly
bucking about his trophies, and for the sake of the argument you will
be good enough to admit that you probably bucked about yours. What
happens? You are overheard; you are followed; you are worked into the
same scheme, and robbed on the same night."

"And you really think this will meet the case?"

"I am quite certain of it, Bunny, so far as it rests with us to meet
the case at all."

"Then give me another cigarette, my dear fellow, and let me push on to
Scotland Yard."

Raffles held up both hands in admiring horror.

"Scotland Yard!"

"To give a false description of what you took from that drawer in my
wardrobe."

"A false description! Bunny, you have no more to learn from me. Time
was when I wouldn't have let you go there without me to retrieve a
lost umbrella--let alone a lost cause!"

And for once I was not sorry for Raffles to have the last unworthy
word, as he stood once more at his outer door and gayly waved me down
the stairs.

The Spoils of Sacrilege

There was one deed of those days which deserved a place in our
original annals. It is the deed of which I am personally most ashamed.
I have traced the course of a score of felonies, from their source in
the brain of Raffles to their issue in his hands. I have omitted all
mention of the one which emanated from my own miserable mind. But in
these supplementary memoirs, wherein I pledged myself to extenuate
nothing more that I might have to tell of Raffles, it is only fair
that I should make as clean a breast of my own baseness. It was I,
then, and I alone, who outraged natural sentiment, and trampled the
expiring embers of elementary decency, by proposing and planning the
raid upon my own old home.

I would not accuse myself the more vehemently by making excuses at
this point. Yet I feel bound to state that it was already many years
since the place had passed from our possession into that of an utter
alien, against whom I harbored a prejudice which was some excuse in
itself. He had enlarged and altered the dear old place out of
knowledge; nothing had been good enough for him as it stood in our
day. The man was a hunting maniac, and where my dear father used to
grow prize peaches under glass, this vandal was soon stabling his
hothouse thoroughbreds, which took prizes in their turn at all the
country shows. It was a southern county, and I never went down there
without missing another greenhouse and noting a corresponding
extension t