ustration]

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The two burglars were really touched, for they had loved Lord Justice
Pimblekin as a true and valuable friend. They knew him to have been an
old gentleman whose abhorrence of the vulgarity of crime had been
equalled by his sensitive horror of illiterate, vulgar, or slangy
speech; and they thus, to a certain extent, understood the painful
nature of his present position, for the involuntary use of the idiom and
ways of the society in which he was now condemned to mix was a part of
his sentence.

Far into the night the judge sat smoking his short spectral pipe and
drinking from an unsubstantial pewter pot, while he listened,
shuddering, to the plans of the two burglars for the carrying out of
their crime. With growing horror he gradually gleaned that the crib to
be cracked was the house of his twin brother the Bishop of Hampstead, a
lonely mansion near the village of Highgate.

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He watched the two malefactors as they cleaned and loaded their
revolvers and made other preparations for the expedition. If that judge
had done his duty, these two would still have been working out their
time for the last crime but seven which they had committed; whereas Lord
Pimblekin had let them off for that job with three months, and visited
their subsequent deeds with penalties which decreased at a constant
ratio, until for the latest--burglarious entry, removal of property
valued at L500, wilful destruction of other property valued at L5,000,
and maiming of two policemen and one footman--he had given them seven
days.

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Now, it happened that there had been for the last year or so before the
disappearance of Justice Pimblekin a disagreement of a somewhat painful
nature between himself and his twin brother the Bishop of Hampstead.

Both were old gentlemen of the utmost purity and philanthropy of
principle, to whom the injuring of anyone--especially a brother--would
have been an idea of the utmost horror.

Besides this, their mutual affection was really very strong; but they
had quarrelled about a matter of principle--a mere trifle: whether a
piece of toast should be buttered on the right or left side; and their
feelings had become temporarily embittered.

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This painful circumstance naturally increased the horror of the unhappy
spectre at the present plans of the burglars, and he made the wildest
efforts to go to his brother and warn him; but he was glued to