Beale, the commissionaire, remained in the hall and lower room--it was catalogued as the “Bronze Room”--Coram patrolled the room at the top of the stairs, Grimsby the next, or Greek, Room, and I the Egyptian Room. None of the doors was locked, and Grimsby, by his own special request, held the keys of the cases in the Greek Room. We commenced our vigil on the Saturday, and I, for one, found it a lugubrious business. One electric lamp was usually left burning in each apartment throughout the night, and I sat as near to that in the Egyptian Room as possible and endeavoured to distract my thoughts with a bundle of papers with which I had provided myself. In the next room I could hear Grimsby walking about incessantly, and, at regular intervals, the scratching of a match as he lighted a cigar. He was an inveterate cheroot smoker. Our first night’s watching, then, was productive of no result, and the five that followed were equally monotonous. Upon Grimsby’s suggestion we observed great secrecy in the matter of these dispositions. Even Coram’s small household was kept in ignorance of this midnight watching. Grimsby, following out some theory of his own, now determined to dispense altogether with light in the Greek Room. Friday was intensely hot, and occasional fitful breezes brought with them banks of black thundercloud, which, however, did not break; and, up to the time that we assumed our posts at the Museum, no rain had fallen. At about twelve o’clock I looked out into South Grafton Square and saw that the sky was entirely obscured by a heavy mass of inky cloud, ominous of a gathering storm. Returning to my chair beneath the electric lamp, I took up a work of Mark Twain’s, which I had brought as a likely antidote to melancholy or nervousness. As I commenced to read, for the twentieth time, “The Jumping Frog,” I heard the scratch of Grimsby’s match in the next room and knew that he had lighted his fifth cigar. It must have been about one o’clock when the rain came. I heard the big drops on the glass roof, followed by the steady pouring of the deluge. For perhaps five minutes it rained steadily, and then ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Above the noise of the water rushing down the metal gutters, I distinctly detected the sound of Grimsby striking another match. Then, with a mighty crash, came the thunder. Directly above the Museum it seemed as though the very heavens had burst, and the glass roof rattled as if a shower of stones had fallen, the thunderous report echoing and reverberating hollowly through the building. As the lightning flashed with dazzling brilliance, I started from my chair and stood, breathless, with every sense on the alert; for, strangely intermingling with the patter of the rain that now commenced to fall again, came a low wailing, like nothing so much as the voice of a patient succumbing to an anæsthetic. There was something indefinably sweet, but indescribably weird, in the low and mysterious music.