had not emptied his own pockets overnight, we arranged that Boots was to forget to empty them for him, and was to bring the clothes downstairs just as he found them.  If Mr. D------’s pockets were emptied, then, of course, it would be necessary to transfer the searching process to Mr. D------’s room.  Under any circumstances, I was certain of the head chambermaid; and under any circumstances, also, the head chambermaid was certain of Boots.

I waited till Tom came home, looking very puffy and bilious about the face; but as to his intellects, if anything, rather sharper than ever.  His report was uncommonly short and pleasant.  The inn was shutting up; Mr. Davager was going to bed in rather a drunken condition; Mr. Davager’s friend had never appeared.  I sent Tom (properly instructed about keeping our man in view all the next morning) to his shake-down behind the office-desk, where I heard him hiccoughing half the night, as even the best boys will, when over-excited and too full of tarts.

At half-past seven next morning, I slipped quietly into Boots’s pantry.

Down came the clothes.  No pockets in trousers.  Waistcoat-pockets empty.  Coat-pockets with something in them.  First, handkerchief; secondly, bunch of keys; thirdly, cigar-case; fourthly, pocketbook.  Of course I wasn’t such a fool as to expect to find the letter there, but I opened the pocketbook with a certain curiosity, notwithstanding.

Nothing in the two pockets of the book but some old advertisements cut out of newspapers, a lock of hair tied round with a dirty bit of ribbon, a circular letter about a loan society, and some copies of verses not likely to suit any company that was not of an extremely free-and-easy description.  On the leaves of the pocketbook, people’s addresses scrawled in pencil, and bets jotted down in red ink.  On one leaf, by itself, this queer inscription: 

“MEM. 5 ALONG. 4 ACROSS.”

I understood everything but those words and figures, so of course I copied them out into my own book.

Then I waited in the pantry till Boots had brushed the clothes, and had taken them upstairs.  His report when he came down was, that Mr. D------ had asked if it was a fine morning.  Being told that it was, he had ordered breakfast at nine, and a saddle-horse to be at the door at ten, to take him to Grimwith Abbey—­one of the sights in our neighborhood which I had told him of the evening before.

“I’ll be here, coming in by the back way, at half-past ten,” says I to the head chambermaid.

“What for?” says she.

“To take the responsibility of making Mr. Davager’s bed off your hands for this morning only,” says I.

“Any more orders?” says she.

“One more,” says I.  “I want to hire Sam for the morning.  Put it down in the order-book that he’s to be brought round to my office at ten.”

In case you should think Sam was a man, I’d better perhaps tell you he was a pony.  I’d made up my mind that it would be beneficial to Tom’s health, after the tarts, if he took a constitutional airing on a nice hard saddle in the direction of Grimwith Abbey.