“This is all very strange and wonderful. But the strangest thing of all has to be related yet. As you will see by the postmark of this letter, we have come to St. Ives for our holiday. We arrived here on Monday, and on Tuesday I was walking on the beach and wondering how you were going on when I saw a group of children become considerably excited. Going up to them I found that one of them was holding a bottle which had been washed up by the tide. Seeing that the bottle was carefully sealed, and appeared to contain papers, I offered the children a shilling for it. They ran off with the shilling in high glee, while I secreted the bottle in my dustcoat, and walked rapidly towards our lodgings with it. I cannot account for the impulse which prompted these apparently irrelevant actions, except upon the hypothesis of Providential interference already mentioned. I do not usually take much interest in the doings of children, and I am not naturally of a prying, inquisitive disposition, and yet I was anxious to open that bottle in the privacy of my own bedroom. And now mark the result. “That bottle contained papers giving a detailed account of all that Hilton Riddell, alias William Trace, had done, and was doing, to ruin you and liberate his brother. What a sneak the fellow has been to deceive people, and to do the tricky things he was doing. No wonder he came to a bad end. And how vindictive he must have been to write down all he wrote on the papers that have so wonderfully been put in my possession. Why, only one half the details would have reversed the relative positions of his brother and yourself, if anyone but me had secured that bottle. It seems miraculous, doesn’t it, that, after tossing about on the waters of the broad Atlantic, the fragile receptacle of a deadly secret should have been guided to the only person who knew how to make a proper use of it? I broke the bottle, and after reading them destroyed the papers. And what do you to say to the strange fact that I, who had never been in St. Ives before, should chance to be there just when that bottle was washed ashore? Only picture what a calamity it would have been had anyone but myself stumbled upon it.