Strange to say, Jack Chicot, although a fair subject for the camera, has had no passion for seeing what kind of picture the sun can make of him. At any rate, there is no portrait of him, large or small, good, bad, or indifferent, to be found in Cibber Street, where the police naturally came to look for one. Mr. Desrolles, who, throughout the case, shows himself accommodating without being officious, gives a graphic description of his late fellow-lodger; but no verbal picture ever yet conjured up the image of a man, and the detectives leave Cibber Street possessed of the idea of a personage no more like Jack Chicot than Jack Chicot was like the Emperor of China. This imaginary Chicot they hunt assiduously in all the worst parts of London, and often seem on the brink of catching him. They watch him dining at low eating-houses, they see him playing billiards in dubious taverns, they follow him on to penny steamers, and accompany him on railroad journeys, always to find that, although sufficiently disreputable, he is not Jack Chicot. Working thus conscientiously, it was hard to be girded at by the _Morning Shrieker_ and an army of letter-writers. Assuredly the evidence against the missing husband was strong enough to weave the rope that should hang him. A letter to the _Times_ from George Gerard describing the dagger found in the colour-box had attracted the attention of the famous surgeon who set La Chicot’s broken leg, and that gentleman had hurried at once to Cibber Street to examine the wound. He afterwards saw the dagger which, with the rest of the missing man’s effects, was in the custody of the police. He wrote to the _Times_ next day, confirming Gerard’s statement. Such a wound could have been inflicted by just such a dagger, and hardly by any other form of knife or dagger known to civilization. The thin flexible blade was unlike the blade of any other dagger the surgeon had ever seen--the wound corresponded to the form of the blade.