The mother appeared stunned and stupefied by the discovery that she had helped to rivet fetters on him, and that he was likely to be tried for housebreaking with an alternative charge of theft. How the charge came to assume this form is the most striking and curious feature of the case. As soon as I got the two addresses I went first to the home of the prisoner, Alfred Scott, and searched in vain for the rest of the plunder; then I went to his employer’s workshop, and unearthed the treasure-trove from a most ingenious hiding-place under a pile of wood which took us ten minutes to remove. Everything was there but the gold chain and the servant’s silver ring, and the whole were still wrapped up in Shorty’s spotted cotton handkerchief, which unfortunately did not bear either name or address. But this discovery was not the most important made at that place. From Scott’s master we learned that our prisoner, along with a journeyman, had been employed making some alterations or repairs in the major’s house about six months before the robbery. The natural inference then was that he upon that occasion had provided himself with casts of some of the keys, and so prepared to commit the robbery—hence the framing of the charge on the serious lines I have indicated. As soon as these facts were made plain, and when the major had identified Scott as one of the joiners who had worked in his house, I went to Shorty’s cell and said that we had got the thief, and that in all probability he and The Fin would be soon at liberty. Shorty received the news not with the satisfaction I had expected, but with a stony stare which seemed to me absolutely idiotic. He made no remark of any kind, and showed neither gratitude nor resentment. It turned out, however, that he and The Fin did not get off so easily, but were convicted and sent for thirty days to prison for “loitering with intent.” Meanwhile Scott persisted in his fatal and blundering silence, and his case came on for trial. He pleaded “not guilty,” and the case went to proof, when the evidence, which, link by link, appeared to demonstrate his guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt, took him completely by surprise. There was the selling of the chain; his contradictions and prevarications; the finding of the plunder, and the fact that he had worked on the premises—all damning. The summing up of the evidence had been completed, and the jury were about to find him guilty without leaving the box, when Scott excitedly asked to be allowed to make a statement in his defence.