“He was wandering along the side-streets of Lisbon one afternoon, when he espied a small curio shop. Outside the window were displayed various articles of furniture, china, etc., for sale, and among these was a curious cameo brooch which rather took his fancy. He entered to make a bid for it, and managed to secure it for what he considered a fair price. He wandered listlessly about the shop, as the woman in charge was placing it in a box for him, and suddenly came upon a glass-covered box full of coins. You may imagine his surprise when, among the rows of copper and silver pieces, he saw staring up at him no less than twelve gold replicas of these mysterious coins of his own. His astonishment was great, but he managed to conceal it from the shop-keeper when he asked her the price she demanded for these ‘medals,’ as he prudently called them. “She named one very little higher than their simple worth as bullion, intimating at the same time that as they did not seem to commemorate any special event, customers for them had been few. She went on to relate how she came to possess them. A strange story indeed. With some pride she told your uncle that her husband was really of noble blood, but sunk to a narrow pittance beyond the keeping up of his title. Ruined by the failure of vintage after vintage, he had at last compounded with his creditors by giving up his landed possessions, and she and he were now living by the sale of art curios, a good proportion of which she sadly explained was from their own dwindling inheritance. “Further inquiry elicited the fact that the ‘medals’ had been discovered in an ancient box of cedar wood, which had been left to rot and moulder in an attic of their former mansion, where, wrapped in papers covered with writing in a foreign tongue, nigh fifty of them had been found strung together on a slender chain. She pointed out that all of them had a small hole beside the rim, and your uncle remembered that the same thing was noticeable in those he possessed himself. “The first and most natural thing was to inquire for the paper wrappings, but for some time these could not be discovered, and it was feared they were lost. However, the next day his lordship received a message from the woman to the effect that she had found them thrust away among a heap of similar refuse and that they were at his service if he chose to purchase them for a small sum. Your uncle did not dally in returning to the shop, as you may suppose. You may also imagine his surprise when he found that one of the documents was not only in English, but absolutely signed by his own ancestor. You shall see the original, so I will not stop to describe it. It is of the other document that I wish particularly to speak.