Produced by Stephen Lins [Illustration: “AN’ WHICH IS THE HONOURABLE JINTLEMAN AS DO BE BURRNIN’ TO PRISINT ME WID A BIT O’ GOOLD?”] ADVENTURES OF MARTIN HEWITT THIRD SERIES by ARTHUR MORRISON ILLUSTRATED BY T.S.C. CROWTHER LONDON WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C. NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE 1896 CONTENTS The Case of the “Flitterbat Lancers” The Case of the Dead Skipper The Case of Mr. Geldard’s Elopement The Case of the late Mr. Rewse The Affair of Mrs. Seton’s Child The Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle THE CASE OF THE “FLITTERBAT LANCERS” I In none of the cases of investigation by Martin Hewitt which I have as yet recorded had I any direct and substantial personal interest. In the case I am about to set forth, however, I had some such interest, though legally, I fear, it amounted to no more than the cost of a smashed pane of glass. But the case in some ways was one of the most curious which came under my notice, and completely justified Hewitt’s oft repeated dictum that there was nothing, however romantic or apparently improbable, that had not happened at some time in London. It was late on a summer evening, two or three years back, that I drowsed in my armchair over a particularly solid and ponderous volume of essays on social economy. I was doing a good deal of reviewing at the time, and I remember that this particular volume had a property of such exceeding toughness that I had already made three successive attacks on it, on as many successive evenings, each attack having been defeated in the end by sleep. The weather was hot, my chair was very comfortable, the days were tiring, and the book had somewhere about its strings of polysyllables an essence as of laudanum. Still something had been done on each evening, and now on the fourth I strenuously endeavoured to finish the book. Late as it was, my lamp had been lighted but an hour or so, for there had been light enough to read by, near the window, till well past nine o’clock. I was just beginning to feel that the words before me were sliding about and losing their meanings, and that I was about to fall asleep after all, when a sudden crash and a jingle of broken glass behind me woke me with a start, and I threw the book down. A pane of glass in my window was smashed, and I hurried across and threw up the sash to see, if I could, whence the damage had come. [Illustration: “A PANE OF GLASS IN MY WINDOW WAS SMASHED.”] I think I have somewhere said (I believe it was in describing the circumstances of the extraordinary death of Mr. Foggatt) that the building in which my chambers (and Hewitt’s office) were situated was accessible--or rather visible, for there was no entrance--from the rear. There was, in fact, a small courtyard, reached by a passage from the street behind, and into this courtyard my sitting-room window looked.