The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English
General
The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction; Ghost stories
Perhaps some of my readers remember a paper of which the figure of
a man carrying a barrel formed the initial letter, and which I
copied from an old spoon now in my possession. As I looked at Mr.
Pinto I do declare he looked so like the figure on that old piece
of plate that I started and felt very uneasy. "Ha!" said he,
laughing through his false teeth (I declare they were false--I
could see utterly toothless gums working up and down behind the
pink coral), "you see I wore a beard den; I am shafed now; perhaps
you tink I am A SPOON. Ha, ha!" And as he laughed he gave a cough
which I thought would have coughed his teeth out, his glass eye
out, his wig off, his very head off; but he stopped this convulsion
by stumping across the room and seizing a little bottle of bright
pink medicine, which, being opened, spread a singular acrid
aromatic odor through the apartment; and I thought I saw--but of
this I cannot take an affirmation--a light green and violet flame
flickering round the neck of the vial as he opened it. By the way,
from the peculiar stumping noise which he made in crossing the
bare-boarded apartment, I knew at once that my strange entertainer
had a wooden leg. Over the dust which lay quite thick on the
boards, you could see the mark of one foot very neat and pretty,
and then a round O, which was naturally the impression made by the
wooden stump. I own I had a queer thrill as I saw that mark, and
felt a secret comfort that it was not CLOVEN.
In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see
him, there were three chairs, one bottomless, a little table on
which you might put a breakfast tray, and not a single other
article of furniture. In the next room, the door of which was
open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing case, with some
splendid diamond and ruby shirt studs lying by it, and a chest of
drawers, and a cupboard apparently full of clothes.
Remembering him in Baden-Baden in great magnificence I wondered at
his present denuded state. "You have a house elsewhere, Mr.
Pinto?" I said.
"Many," says he. "I have apartments in many cities. I lock dem
up, and do not carry mosh logish."
I then remembered that his apartment at Baden, where I first met
him, was bare, and had no bed in it.
"There is, then, a sleeping room beyond?"
"This is the sleeping room." (He pronounces it DIS. Can this, by
the way, give any clew to the nationality of this singular man?)
"If you sleep on these two old chairs you have a rickety couch; if
on the floor, a dusty one."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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