The events which I am about to relate took place between nine and ten years
ago. Sebastopol had fallen in the early spring, the peace of Paris had been
concluded since March, our commercial relations with the Russian empire were
but recently renewed; and I, returning home after my first northward journey
since the war, was well pleased with the prospect of spending the month of
December under the hospitable and thoroughly English roof of my excellent
friend, Jonathan Jelf, Esq., of Dumbleton Manor, Clayborough, East Anglia.
Travelling in the interests of the wellknown firm in which it is my lot to be a junior
partner, I had been called upon to visit not only the capitals of Russia and
Poland, but had found it also necessary to pass some weeks among the trading
ports of the Baltic; whence it came that the year was already far spent before I
again set foot on English soil, and that, instead of shooting pheasants with him,
as I had hoped, in October, I came to be my friend's guest during the more genial
Christmas-tide.
My voyage over, and a few days given up to business in Liverpool and London, I
hastened down to Clayborough with all the delight of a school-boy whose
holidays are at hand. My way lay by the Great East Anglian line as far as
Clayborough station, where I was to be met by one of the Dumbleton carriages
and conveyed across the remaining nine miles of country. It was a fogey
afternoon, singularly warm for the 4th of December, and I had arranged to leave
London by the 4:15 express. The early darkness of winter had already closed in;
the lamps were lighted in the carriages; a clinging damp dimmed the windows,
adhered to the door-handles, and pervaded all the atmosphere; while the gas-
jets at the neighbouring book-stand diffused a luminous haze that only served to
make the gloom of the terminus more visible. Having arrived some seven
minutes before the starting of the train, and, by the connivance of the guard,
taken sole possession of empty compartment, I lighted my travelling-lamp, made
myself particularly snug, and settled down to the undisturbed enjoyment of a
book and a cigar. Great, therefore, was my disappointment when, at the last
moment, a gentleman came hurrying along the platform, glanced into my
carriage, opened the locked door with a private key, a stepped in.
It struck me at the first glance that I had seen him before--a tall, spare man, thin-
lipped, light-eyed, with an ungraceful stoop in the shoulders and scant gray hair
worn somewhat long upon collar. He carried a light waterproof coat, an umbrella,
and a large brown japanned deed-box, which last he placed under the seat. This
done, he felt carefully in his breast-pocket, as if to make certain of the safety of
his purse or pocket-book, laid his umbrella in the netting overhead, spread the
waterproof across his knees, and exchanged his hat for a travelling-cap of some
