He said this with such respect and civility that had a stranger who was not aware of the real state of the case been present, he would have found it difficult to believe that the man was in any way concerned in the affair. I am inclined to think that an experience such as mine has never befallen another man. Here I was in captivity--if not in the heart of London, at any rate in one of her Suburbs--sitting down to peruse, in cold blood, a newspaper account of my own abduction. The first I picked up recorded the fact that I had been present at a dinner at Wiltshire House, on the previous evening, and that I had returned to my own abode afterwards. My servant, Williams, had given evidence as to the receipt of a note by me, which purported to have been written by the Duke of Rotherhithe. In it the latter asked me to come to him at once. "His Grace sent one of his carriages," Williams remarked in conclusion, "and when my master got into it, that was the last I saw of him." Then came Rotherhithe's vehement declaration that the letter was a forgery, and his most positive assertion, corroborated by his head coachman, that not one of his horses or carriages had left the stables after his return from Wiltshire House. "The fact therefore remains," said the writer, at the termination of his article, "that the disappearance of Sir George Manderville must be relegated to that catalogue of inexplicable crimes, to which so many of our foremost men have fallen victims of late." The reports in the other papers were, for the most part, couched in similar language.