“And you call yourself a detective?” he scornfully shouted, and his private opinions which followed are not worth recording. “I believe that is what I am called, and what I earn my bread by,” I quietly returned. “Well, I’ll tell you what you are!” he shouted, working himself nearly black in the face; and he then proceeded to declare that I had been bought over by his enemies, and that he would now trust, not to the police or the law for redress, but to himself. He looked so like a maniac in his rage and fury, that I did not trouble to reply, but left him and got back to Edinburgh, where other work soon drove the recollection of the baker’s petty affair out of my head. Coglin’s detective work did not begin where mine left off. He had quite settled in his own mind who was the guilty one, and his only difficulty was to decide on what punishment should be meted out to the herring hawker. Many plans suggested themselves, but they mostly had the objectionable feature of bringing the self-appointed judge and executioner within reach of the law. At length a chance remark of Burfoot—who, all unconscious of impending evil, was still on friendly terms with the baker—prompted him to a scheme as ingenious as it was diabolical. A son and heir had been born to Burfoot, and he gleefully told the baker that he should soon hold a party of rejoicing over the event, when the christening could conveniently take place. He did not invite Coglin to form one of the party, but that oversight did not distress the baker. “I wish I could poison the whole of them,” was his inward comment as he turned to his bakehouse, and out of that remark sprang the great scheme. Coglin of course knew something of the baking of fancy bread, and the same evening, as soon as his ordinary work was over, he set to and made a fine christening cake. He was careful to cover up the windows and every chink in the door before beginning. In making up the cake he hesitated long between some arsenic which he had got for the rats in the bakehouse and another powerful drug as a seasoning; but, having made his choice and hurried up the cake, he waited and watched the firing of it as eagerly and attentively as if a Princess Royal had been intended as the joyful recipient. The cake did not rise well, probably owing to the queer spicing it had got, but Coglin chucklingly decided that the sugaring would cover that. He snowed it over with a preparation of white sugar, and then flowered it over the corners and edges with pink, and finished up by lettering it boldly in sugar as “A Present from Edinburgh.”