awlver," 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 retaliated after the live letter of the
Mosaic law. There was one bristling broadside of revolvers under the
longest shelf of closed eyes and swollen throats. There were festoons
of rope-ladders--none so ingenious as ours--and then at last there was
something that the clerk knew all about. It was a small tin
cigarette-box, and the name upon the gaudy wrapper was not the name of
Sullivan. Yet Raffles and I knew even more about this exhibit than the
clerk.

"There, now," said our guide, "you'll never guess the history of that!
I'll give you twenty guesses, and the twentieth will be no nearer than
the first."

"I'm sure of it, my good fellow," rejoined Raffles, a discreet twinkle
in his eye. "Tell us about it, to save time."

And he opened, as he spoke, his own old twenty-five tin of purely
popular cigarettes; there were a few in it still, but between the
cigarettes were jammed lumps of sugar wadded with cotton-wool. I saw
Raffles weighing the lot in his hand with subtle satisfaction. But the
clerk saw merely the mystification which he desired to create.

"I thought that'd beat you, sir," said he. "It was an American dodge.
Two smart Yankees got a jeweller to tak