Mr. Fettiplace drew his hand slowly across his forehead and closed his blue eyes, as if hesitating for a reply. “There is so much that is hard to believe connected with Amos that one ought to prepare his audience before talking about him. I will tell you one little thing that happened to myself, an occurrence not dependent upon other people’s credulity. One day last autumn, late in the afternoon, I was walking along an untravelled road through the woods, when I met two little children who were playing horse. The front one, the horse, wore a garment that looked like a white silk overcoat without sleeves. Otherwise the children were roughly clad, with battered straw hats and bare feet. The overcoat had a curious, Oriental cut, and there was a good deal of style to it; so much, in fact, and of such a foreign flavor, that I stopped to get a better look at it. The wearer, a boy of eight or ten, I recognized as the son of an unprosperous farmer who lived in a dilapidated old house not far away. When I asked him where he got his jacket he said he wore it at the children’s tableaux: that he was the prince who awoke the sleeping beauty in the town hall last night. Then I remembered there had been a performance to raise money for the library. “While talking with him I noticed there were four rows of little pearl-shaped buttons around the neck and down the front. They formed part of an elaborate design, beautifully embroidered in gold and silver thread, old and somewhat tarnished, but in excellent preservation. I asked him what those ornaments were, and he answered they were beads. ‘But who owns the jacket?’ I asked: ‘Does it belong to you?’ No, it belonged to Mrs. Judd, who had lent it for the performance. ‘Then why don’t you return it to Mrs. Judd?’ Oh, they were going to return it to-morrow morning. I offered to take it, as I was going that way, and the jacket was handed over. “The more I examined the article, the more interested I became, and finally I sat down on a rock and made a study of it. I found the garment was of white silk and completely covered with a most elaborate stitching of gold and silver thread. I am no expert in precious stones, but I knew those beads were either pearls or tremendously clever imitations, and when I remembered there was a good old-fashioned mystery connected with Amos’s arrival in these parts, I began to feel that the beads stood a fair chance of being more than they pretended. I counted a hundred and twenty of them.