'Don't bracket me with you!'

'Not at all, you are worse than I.

It is you who decline to return the contents of the box to its proper owner.

Put it to yourself, you have some common sense, my dear old friend!-do you suppose that a diamond worth more than a thousand pounds is to be honestly bought for ninepence?'

He resumed his old trick of dancing about the room.

'I was a fool ever to have let you have the box! I ought to have known better than to have trusted you; goodness knows you have given me sufficient cause to mistrust you! Over and over again! Your character is only too notorious! You have plundered friend and foe alike-friend and foe alike! As for the rubbish which you call your collection, nine-tenths of it, I know as a positive fact, you have stolen out and out.'

'Who stole my Sir Walter Raleigh pipe? Wasn't it a man named Pugh?'

'Look here, Joseph Tress!'

'I'm looking.'

'Oh, it's no good talking to you, not the least! You're-you're dead to all the promptings of conscience! May I inquire, Mr. Tress, what it is you propose to do?'

'I propose to do nothing, except summon the representatives of law and order. Failing that, my dear Pugh, I had some faint, vague, very vague idea of taking the contents of your ninepenny puzzle to a certain firm in Hatton Garden, who are dealers in precious stones, and to learn from them if they are disposed to give anything for it, and if so, what.'

'I shall come with you.'

With pleasure, on condition that you pay the cab.'

'I pay the cab! I will pay half.'

'Not at all. You will either pay the whole fare, or else I will have one cab and you shall have another. It is a three-shilling cab fare from here to Hatton Garden. If you propose to share my cab, you will be so good as to hand over that three shillings before we start.'

He gasped, but he handed over the three shillings. There are few things I enjoy so much as getting money out of Pugh! On the road to Hatton Garden we wrangled nearly all the way. I own that I feel a certain satisfaction in irritating Pugh, he is such an irritable man. He wanted to know what I thought we should get for the diamond.

'You can't expect to get much for the contents of a ninepenny puzzle, not even the price of a cab fare, Pugh.'

He eyed me, but for some minutes he was silent. Then he

began again.

'Tress, I don't think we ought to let it go for less than-than five thousand pounds.'

'Seriously, Pugh, I doubt whether, when the whole affair is ended, we shall get five thousand pence for it, or, for the matter of that, five thousand farthings.'

'But why not? Why not? It's a magnificent stone-magnificent!-I'll stake my life on it."

I tapped my breast with the tips of my fingers.

There's a warning voice within my breast that ought to be in yours, Pugh! Something tells me, perhaps it is the unusually ɛtrong vein of common sense which I possess, that the contents of your ninepenny puzzle will be found to be a magnificent do-an ingenious practical joke, my friend.'

'I don't believe it.'

But I think he did; at any rate, I had unsettled the founda. tions of his faith.

We entered the Hatton Garden office side by side; in his anxiety not to let me get before him, Pugh actually clung to my arm. The office was divided into two parts by a counter which ran from wall to wall. I advanced to a man who stood on the other side of this counter.

'I want to sell you a diamond.'

'We want to sell you a diamond,' interpolated Pugh.

I turned to Pugh. I'fixed' him with my glance.

'I want to sell you a diamond. Here it is. What will you give me for it?'

Taking the crystal from my waistcoat pocket I handed it to the man on the other side of the counter. Directly he got it between his fingers, and saw what it was that he had got, I noticed a sudden gleam come into his eyes.

'This is-this is rather a fine stone.'

Pugh nudged my arm.

'I told you so.' I paid no attention to Pugh. 'What will you give me for it?'

'Do you mean, what will I give you for it cash down upon the nail ? '

'Just so what will you give me for it cash down upon the nail?'

The man turned the crystal over and over in his fingers. 'Well, that's rather a large order. We don't often get a chance of buying such a stone as this across the counter. do you say to-well-to ten thousand pounds? '

What

Ten thousand pounds! It was beyond my wildest imaginings. Pugh gasped. He lurched against the counter.

'Ten thousand pounds!' he echoed.

The man on the other side glanced at him, I thought, a little curiously.

'If you can give me references, or satisfy me in any way as to your bona fides, I am prepared to give you for this diamond an open cheque for ten thousand pounds, or if you prefer it, the cash instead.'

I stared; I was not accustomed to see business transacted on quite such lines as those.

'We'll take it,' murmured Pugh; I believe he was too much overcome by his feelings to do more than murmur. I interposed.

My dear sir, you will excuse my saying that you arrive very rapidly at your conclusions. In the first place, how can you make sure that is a diamond?'

The man behind the counter smiled.

'I should be very ill fitted for the position which I hold if I could not tell a diamond directly I get a sight of it, especially

such a stone as this.'

'But have you no tests you can apply?'

'We have tests which we apply in cases in which doubt exists, but in this case there is no doubt whatever. I am as sure that this is a diamond as I am sure that it is air I breathe.

here is a test.'

However,

There was a wheel close by the speaker. It was worked by a treadle. It was more like a superior sort of travelling tinker's grindstone than anything else. The man behind the counter put his foot upon the treadle. The wheel began to revolve. He brought the crystal into contact with the swiftly revolving wheel. There was a s-s-sh! And, in an instant, his hand was empty; the crystal had vanished into air.

'Good Heavens!' he gasped. I never saw such a look of amazement on a human countenance before. 'It's splintered!'

POSTSCRIPT.

It was a diamond, although it had splintered. In that fact lay the point of the joke. The man behind the counter had not been wrong; examination of such dust as could be collected proved that fact beyond a doubt. It was declared by experts that the diamond, at some period of its history, had been subjected to intense and continuing heat. The result had been to make it as brittle as glass.

There could be no doubt that its original owner had been an expert too. He knew where he got it from, and he probably knew what it had endured. He was aware that, from a mercantile point of view, it was worthless; it could never have been cut. So, having a turn for humour of a peculiar kind, he had devoted days, and weeks, and possibly months, to the construction of that puzzle. He had placed the diamond inside, and he had enjoyed, in anticipation and in imagination, the Alnaschar visions of the lucky finder.

Pugh blamed me for the catastrophe. He said, and still says, that if I had not, in a measure, and quite gratuitously, insisted on a test, the man behind the counter would have been satisfied with the evidence of his organs of vision, and we should have been richer by ten thousand pounds. But I satisfy my conscience with the reflection that what I did at any rate was honest, though, at the same time, I am perfectly well aware that such a reflection gives Pugh no sort of satisfaction.

512

PREHISTORIC TREPANNING.

ONE of the most remarkable revelations made of late years by prehistoric archæology relative to primitive man has been that of the extent to which trepanning was practised by the men of the polished stone age-the men who erected the rude stone monuments of which Stonehenge and Carnac are the highest expressions.

In 1872, Dr. Prunières first called attention to the fact that among the interments of the neolithic age in the limestone caverns of Lozère, and under the so-called dolmens, a certain number of skulls found had been surgically treated. Portions of the skull had been removed, in many cases during life; whereas others had been trepanned after death. There could be no question but that in many cases those who had been operated upon had survived the operation, as the reparative efforts of nature were marked.

The matter was taken up by Dr. Broca, who published an essay on the subject, which he had communicated to the Anthropological Congress at Buda-Pesth in 1876. It has since been investigated by M. Nadaillac, and has been recently referred to by Count D'Alviella in his Hibbert Lectures for 1891.

A word first upon the race which practised trepanning. As far as can be ascertained, it entered Europe by the shores of the Baltic from the Caucasus and Crimea, strewing the plains of Pomerania, Hanover, and Gröningen with their monuments, erected out of the stones left by the rafts of ice that floated over these submerged plains in the glacial period. This race occupied Denmark and Sweden, crossed into Great Britain, and has left its remains in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the West of England, Dorset, Wiltshire, and Kent. It entered France, made Brittany its stronghold, traced up the rivers to the central plateau of France, but never occupied the upper waters of the Elbe, the Rhine, or the Meuse, was never on the Danube at all, and though it descended from the central mountains of France to the Rhone, yet never advanced far east beyond it. On the other hand, it crossed the Pyrenees, erected its rude stone monuments in Spain and Portugal, traversed the Straits of Gibraltar, and after setting up some circles and cromlechs in Northern Africa, disappeared altogether.