There were no breakages, or marks of prising with crowbars or chisels—the door appeared to have been opened in the ordinary way, by inserting a key and turning back the bolts of the locks. The detectors on the lock of the safe showed that no skeleton keys had been applied or used, and yet the old gardener declared that the key of the safe had never been intrusted to him. He did not know who had it, or where it was kept. He had the keys of all the rooms, and also the key of the press in which the safe was built, but not the actual key of the safe. The entire contents of the safe had been turned out on the pantry floor, and the thieves had then shown great discrimination in the selection of their plunder. None of the plated articles had been removed; only genuine silver, and, as some of these exactly resembled each other, the thieves had shown a skill almost magical. The old gardener, of course, knew nothing of what had been in the safe; and, seeing the plated articles littering the floor, he only said he _thought_ the place had been robbed. It was only after word had been sent to the Central Office, and we had telegraphed to the Arthurlies, that we learned that the value of the silver plate alone was upwards of £500, and that there had been in the safe other articles of value which brought the total loss nearly up to £800. Within an hour of the report being sent in, I was out at the house, and was shown over the various rooms by the old gardener. To say that the old man looked excited and strange would be but faintly to describe his appearance. He was deathly pale; he trembled at the slightest question or look; his teeth chattered when he spoke; and he gave the most stupid and confused answers to some of the simplest queries. I had not been long in the premises when I found that there were several peculiarities about the robbery which marked it off from the ordinary burglary. There were three doors to the house. Two of these—the area door and the back door—had never been touched. They were bolted and locked just as they had been left. No window had been forced; every one was closed, and fastened, and shuttered exactly as it had been left. This narrowed the means of ingress to one door—the main door, which was secured by two patent locks. It was the keys of these locks which the old gardener carried and used in entering the house. I examined these locks closely, and when done, decided that they had not been opened with skeleton keys or tampered with in any way; either the door had been left unlocked, or the keys, or duplicates of these keys, had been used in effecting an entrance. The second peculiarity was that no room in the whole house of three storeys had been entered but the pantry. There had been no rummaging through bedrooms for valuables, no turning out of rare china and curiosities in the drawing-room, though there were articles of that kind there far exceeding in value the plate stolen. The thieves