sked next
what I was carrying in that leathern case, and, by way of answer,
I unlocked the box and produced my manuscript. There was a curious
restraint visible in the manner of my examiners when I performed this
simple action, and I could not in the least understand it at the time,
although its reason became clear enough a minute later. "I beg your
pardon, Mr Murray," said the man who had first laid a detaining hand
upon me, "there has been a mistake, but we were compelled to do our
duty." He intimated that I was at liberty to go, which in some heat I
declined to do, until I had received some explanation of this arrest of
a private citizen bound on legitimate affairs. I had missed the tidal
train, and I represented that this had caused me some inconvenience.

Then the truth came out The hotel des Chevaux Blancs, in innocent
seeming little Roche-fort, had been for some months past a hot-bed of
European anarchy. The people who went and came there were surrounded
by spies, and the police of Dover had been advised by telegraph, of the
departure of a noted anarchist, who was carrying precisely such a box
as that in which I had bestowed my manuscript. Before I left Dover, it
transpired that a man had been arrested in Folkestone who was carrying
with him enough of Atlas dynamite to have wrecked a whole square. The
movements of each of us had been watched by the continental police,
and had been wired to England. There had been a moment at which the two
boxes had been laid on the same bench on the platform at Jemelle, and
I have often since pictured to myself the imbroglio which might have
ensued if they had been accidentally exchanged. It could not have lasted
long in the nature of things, but it would certainly have afforded me a
new experience.

I have had a good deal to do with the police in my time, as most working
journalists have, and this reminds me of one or two adventures which, if
I had preserved a chronological order in my narrative, should have
been told earlier. Before I left Birmingham I became acquainted with an
officer who afterwards became eminent in the service of Scotland Yard.
The fashion in which we were introduced to each other was sufficiently
dramatic. It was an hour after midnight in a heavy rain and the place
was Pinfold Street, at the back of the premises of the _Birmingham
Morning News_. A bedraggled woman ran shrieking uphill with cries
of "help" and "murder," and behind her staggered a drunken ru