“When I took the garment to Mrs. Judd and told her what I thought, she didn’t seem at all surprised; simply told me it had been lying in a bureau-drawer ever since Amos came, about twenty years ago. She is over eighty and her memory has gone rapidly the last few years, but she closed her eyes, stroked her hair, and said she remembered now that her husband had told her this jacket was worth a good many dollars. And so they always kept it locked away in an upstairs drawer, but she had forgotten all about that when she offered it to the Faxons for their performance. Down the front of the jacket were large splashes of a dark reddish-brown color which she said had always been there, and she remembered thinking, as she first laid the coat away, that Amos had been in some mischief with currant jelly. Amos was away just then, but when he returned we took all the beads off, and a few days later I showed a dozen of them to a New York jeweller who said they were not only real pearls, but for size and quality he had seldom seen their equal.” “They must have been tremendously valuable,” said Molly. “They averaged twelve hundred dollars apiece.” “Gracious!” she exclaimed. “And there were a hundred and twenty of them?” “Yes; they brought a little more than a hundred and forty thousand dollars.” “It all harmonizes with Judd’s appearance,” said Mr. Cabot; “I should not expect him to subsist on every-day American dividends. But it’s a good jacket, even for fairy land.” “Yes, it certainly is, and yet there was the usual touch of economy in it,” Mr. Fettiplace continued. “When we came to remove the pearls, we found a little gold loop or ring in the setting behind each one of them. Those loops passed through a sort of circular button-hole in the garment, and a gold wire, running along beneath the silk, held the jewels in place, so that by drawing out the wire they were all detached.” “Well, where was the economy in that?” “By being adjusted and removed so easily they probably served, when occasion required, as necklace, belt, bracelets, earrings, diadems, or the Lord knows what.” “Of course,” assented Mr. Cabot. “A frugal device that might be of service to other farmers. And you began, Sam, by describing Daleford as an uneventful place. It seems to me that Bagdad is nothing to it.” Mr. Fettiplace sipped his coffee without replying. After a short silence, however, with his eyes upon the coffee which he stirred in an absent-minded way, he continued: “There are one or two other things connected with Judd which are much more difficult to explain. Daleford is full of mysterious tales of supernatural happenings in which he is the hero of prophecies and extraordinary fulfilments; always incredible, but told in honest faith by practical, hard-headed people. Any native will give them to you by the yard, but the hero, under no conditions, ever alludes to them himself.”