And then, quickly with a half-laugh: 'Oh, well, Mr. Taylor, you're straight, I know you wouldn't throw me down, and it's twenty years, anyhow.' He went on to say that he had landed in town just about the time of the Charity Ball, when the papers were full of the diamonds--you remember, don't you? The Pallinders were It then. 'I thought I might get the job of butler at the house, and applied,' he said. 'Nothin' doin'--their help was all coloured. The very next day Doctor Vardaman's advertisement came out; say, I was right there with the goods. He was easy, the old gent was. I hadn't spieled my little spiel five minutes before I saw it was 'M' lud, the carriage waits,' for mine. And let me tell you, Mr. Taylor, I was wise to the Pallinder game from the start; I knew Pallinder was due to blow up any day, and your Uncle James would have to hustle to get those diamonds, or somebody else would. That's why I went after 'em by the Romeo-and-Juliet route, 'stead of taking it slow and easy, and getting to be like a son of the house like I'd planned. Well, you know that deal fell through owing to Mrs. Pallinder's neuralgia; if you and the colonel and everybody else had stepped a little livelier, you'd 'a' nipped me. As it was, I just barely had time to get back home; and then what does the faithful, devoted, all-to-the-square-dealing Huddesley do but wake up Doctor Vardaman, and lodge an information against himself----' 'What?' I cried. 'You were the burglar?' To tell the truth, I hadn't quite been able to follow Huddesley's flights of metaphor for the last few sentences, until all at once it come over me what he meant. 'You mean you were the burglar all the time?' I asked him. He grinned with a queer kind of pride. 'Sure I was. But, say, didn't I play it smooth? Couldn't I give Hen. Irving cards and spades, though? Next day I _did_ have a sore throat--I'm subject to 'em--but I wasn't sick like Doctor Vardaman thought. I kept up the game--stayed in bed and passed up the cops and the high-brows with the stylographic pens--I couldn't risk seein' 'em, you know. I don't know how that fellow Judd got on the trail--I guess he had a little more grey matter than the rest of 'em. Of course they had photos and descriptions of me all over the country. Anyway, when he turned up, peddlin' collar-buttons about six weeks later, I was next right off. I knew I'd better beat it for the tall and waving--but I did hate like poison to go without those rhinestones--after all the trouble I'd took, too.' The fellow's persistence and patience were something astonishing," said J. B., with wonder. "Enough to have insured his success at any honest undertaking, you'd think. He told me it was very hard to keep up the role. 'Sometimes I'd forget--about the talk, and all, you know,' he said. 'And then I'd lay awake at nights in a cold sweat for fear somebody had noticed it. Yes, sir, I'd been studying and studying, making myself solid with everybody, and playing the