Aunt Sarah was very fussy about her jewels. In perpetual apprehension lest they might be stolen, she carried them with her whenever she took a change of air (and she had a good many such changes), while in her own house she kept them in some profoundly secret hiding-place. I have an idea that it was under a removable board in the floor of her bedroom. Of course, we all professed to share Aunt Sarah's solicitude, and it had been customary in the family, from times beyond my knowledge, to greet her first with inquiries as to her own health, and next with hopes for the safety of the jewels. But, as a matter of fact, they were not vastly valuable things; probably they were worth more than the case they were kept in, but not very much. Aunt Sarah never wore them--even she would not go as far as that. They were nothing but a small heap of clumsy old brooches, ear-rings, and buckles, with one or two very long, thin watch-chains, and certain mourning and signet rings belonging to departed members of the family who had flourished (or not) in the early part of the century. There were no big diamonds among them--scarcely any diamonds at all, in fact; but the garnets and cats' eyes strove to make good in size and ugliness of setting what they lacked in mere market worth. Chief of all the "jewels," and most precious of Aunt Sarah's possessions, was a big amethyst brooch, with a pane of glass let in behind, inclosing a lock of the reddest hair I have ever seen. It was the hair of Aunt Sarah's own uncle Joseph, the most distinguished member of the family, who had written three five-act tragedies, and dedicated them all, one after another, to George the Fourth. Joseph's initials appeared on the frame of the brooch behind--"J." on one side and "S." on the other. It was, on the whole, perhaps, the ugliest and clumsiest of all Aunt Sarah's jewels, and I never saw anything else like it anywhere, except one; and that, singularly enough, was an exact duplicate--barring, of course, the hair and the inscription--in a very mouldy shop in Soho, where all sorts of hopelessly out-of-date rings and brooches and chains hung for sale. It was the way of the shopkeeper to ticket these gloomy odds and ends with cheerful inscriptions, such as "Antique, 17s. 6d.," "Real Gold, £1 5s.," "Quaint, £2 2s. 6d." But even he could find no more promising adjective for the hideous brooch than "massive"--which was quite true. He wanted £3 for the thing when I first saw it, and it slowly declined, by half-a-crown at a time, to £1 15s., and then it vanished altogether. I wondered at the time what misguided person could have bought it; but I learnt afterward that the shopkeeper had lost heart, and used the window space for something else. [Illustration: "A SECRET HIDING-PLACE."]