“’I have called to see M. Mirsky,” I said, ’with a confidential letter——­’

“‘Oh, yas, yas,’ he answered hastily; ’I know—­I know.  Excuse me one minute.’  And he rushed off down-stairs with his parcel.

“Here was a noble chance.  For a moment I thought of following him, in case there might be something interesting in the parcel.  But I had to decide in a moment, and I decided on trying the room.  I slipped inside the door, and, finding the key on the inside, locked it.  It was a confused sort of room, with a little iron bedstead in one corner and a sort of rough boarded inclosure in another.  This I rightly conjectured to be the photographic dark-room, and made for it at once.

“There was plenty of light within when the door was left open, and I made at once for the drying-rack that was fastened over the sink.  There were a number of negatives in it, and I began hastily examining them one after another.  In the middle of this our friend Mirsky returned and tried the door.  He rattled violently at the handle and pushed.  Then he called.

“At this moment I had come upon the first of the negatives you have just smashed.  The fixing and washing had evidently only lately been completed, and the negative was drying on the rack.  I seized it, of course, and the others which stood by it.

“‘Who are you, there, inside?’ Mirsky shouted indignantly from the landing.  ’Why for you go in my room like that?  Open this door at once, or I call the police!’

“I took no notice.  I had got the full number of negatives, one for each drawing, but I was not by any means sure that he had not taken an extra set; so I went on hunting down the rack.  There were no more, so I set to work to turn out all the undeveloped plates.  It was quite possible, you see, that the other set, if it existed, had not yet been developed.

“Mirsky changed his tune.  After a little more banging and shouting I could hear him kneel down and try the key-hole.  I had left the key there, so that he could see nothing.  But he began talking softly and rapidly through the hole in a foreign language.  I did not know it in the least, but I believe it was Russian.  What had led him to believe I understood Russian I could not at the time imagine, though I have a notion now.  I went on ruining his stock of plates.  I found several boxes, apparently of new plates, but, as there was no means of telling whether they were really unused or Avere merely undeveloped, but with the chemical impress of your drawings on them, I dragged every one ruthlessly from its hiding-place and laid it out in the full glare of the sunlight—­destroying it thereby, of course, whether it was unused or not.

“Mirsky left off talking, and I heard him quietly sneaking off.  Perhaps his conscience was not sufficiently clear to warrant an appeal to the police, but it seemed to me rather probable at the time that that was what he was going for.  So I hurried on with my work.  I found three dark slides—­the parts that carried the plates in the back of the camera, you know—­one of them fixed in the camera itself.  These I opened, and exposed the plates to ruination as before.  I suppose nobody ever did so much devastation in a photographic studio in ten minutes as I managed.