While I wrote, the Earl perused the document, the loss of which had caused the Cabinets of Europe so much apprehension, and taking his magnifying glass he examined the portions of the seal still remaining. Then carefully unlocking one of the small private drawers in the top of the great writing-table, he took therefrom some object, and gazed upon it long and earnestly. With a heavy sigh he again replaced it, and slowly locked the drawer. When I had finished and placed the instructions to Sir. Philip Emden before him, he took up his quill, corrected my letter, here and there adding an emphatic word or two, and then appended his signature. Obtaining one of the bags used for the transmission of single dispatches, I deposited it therein, sealed it, and placed upon it one of those labels with a cross drawn upon its face, the signification of that mark being that it is never to be lost sight of by the messenger. There are two kinds of bags sent out and received by the Foreign Office, one with this cross-marked label, and the other without it. The latter are generally larger and less important, and may be placed with the messenger's luggage. It is no pleasant life our messengers lead, liable as they are to be summoned at an hour's notice to "proceed at once" to anywhere, from Brussels to Teheran. Armed with a _laissez-passer_, they are constantly hurrying over the face of Europe as fast as the fastest expresses can carry them, passing through the frontier stations freed from the troublesome concomitant of ordinary travelling--the examination of luggage--known on all the great trunk lines from Paris to Constantinople and from Rome to St Petersburg, sometimes bearing epoch-making documents, sometimes a lady's hat of latest mode, or a parcel of foreign delicacies, but always on the alert, and generally sleeping on a layer of stiff dispatches and bulky "notes." At last, having made up the bag, I rose slowly and faced my chief. "Well," he exclaimed, raising his keen eyes from the document I had brought him and regarding me with that stony, sphinx-like expression he assumed when resolved upon cross-questioning, "how did you obtain possession of this?" "I found it," I answered. "Found it?" he growled, with a cynical curl of the lip. "I suppose you have some lame story that you picked it up in the street, or something-- eh!" he exclaimed testily. "No," I replied hoarsely. "Mine is no lame story, although a wretched one. The discovery has unnerved and bewildered me; it--" "I have no desire to know how its discovery affected you mentally," he interrupted, with impatient sarcasm. "I asked where you found it," he observed coldly. "I found it in my own house," I answered. "Then you mean to tell me that it has been in your possession the whole time. The thing's impossible," he cried angrily. "Remember the dummy palmed off upon me, and the fact that an exact copy was transmitted to St Petersburg."