"I have no more idea or knowledge of whose hands they were in, and had been in, for many years, until they were restored to me, than the man in the moon has!" affirmed the witness. "I'll tell you the whole story--willingly: I could have told it yesterday to certain gentlemen, whom I see present, if they had not treated me as an impostor as soon as they saw me. Well,"--here he folded his hands on the ledge of the witness-box, and quietly fixing his eyes on the examining counsel, proceeded to speak in a calm, conversational tone--"the story is this: I left England about five-and-thirty years ago after certain domestic unpleasantnesses which I felt so much that I determined to give up all connection with my family and to start an absolutely new life of my own. I went away to Australia and landed there under the name of Wickham. I had a certain amount of money which had come to me from my mother. I speculated with it on my arrival, somewhat foolishly, no doubt, and I lost it--every penny. "So then I was obliged to work for my living. I went up country, and for some time worked as a miner in the Bendigo district. I had been working in this way perhaps fourteen months when an accident occurred in the mine at which I was engaged. There was a serious fall of earth and masonry; two or three of my fellow-workers were killed on the spot, and I was taken up for dead. I was removed to a local hospital--there had been some serious injury to my head and spine, but I still had life in me, and I was brought round. But I remained in hospital, in a sort of semiconscious state, for a long time--months. When I went back, after my discharge, to my quarters--nothing but a rough shanty which I had shared with many other men--all my possessions had vanished. Among them, of course, were the papers I had kept, and a packet of letters written to me by my mother when I was a schoolboy at Eton. "Of course, I knew at once what had happened--some one of my mates, believing me to be dead, had appropriated all my belongings and gone off with them. There was nothing at all to be wondered at in that--it was the usual thing in such a society. And I knew there was nothing to do but to accept my loss philosophically." "Did you make no effort to recover your possessions?" asked Mr. Millington-Bywater.