No objection to this proceeding having been offered by any of the persons present, the search began; my friend submitting himself the first.

The operation was a tedious one; for it was unsuccessful.  One after another, including the three suspicious characters already alluded to, was searched, but no pocket-book was found.  At length, the last person was taken in hand; and he, too, proved innocent—­at least of the possession of my lost treasure.

I was in despair at this result, thinking that my friend must have been mistaken as to the robbery—­that is, as to his having witnessed it—­and that my money was irretrievably gone.  No such despair of the issue, however, came over my friend—­he did not appear in the least disconcerted; but, on the completion of the fruitless search, merely nodded his head, uttering an expressive humph.

“It’s gone,” said I to him in bitter anguish.

“Patience a bit, my lad,” he replied, with a smile.  “The pocket-book is within these four walls, and we’ll find it too.”

Turning now to one of the men belonging to the establishment, he desired him to bring one of the rakes with which they levelled the sawdust in the area.

It was brought; when he set the man to work with it—­to rake up, slowly and deliberately, the surface of the sawdust, himself vigilantly superintending the operation, and directing the man to proceed regularly, and to leave no spot untouched.  I need not say with what intense interest I watched this proceeding.  I felt as if life or death were in the issue; for the loss of such a sum as L30, although it could not, perhaps, be considered a very great one, was sufficiently large to distress my father seriously; and already some idea of never facing him again, should the money not be recovered, began to cross my mind.

All thoughts, however, of this or any other kind were absorbed, for the moment, by the deep interest which I took in the operations of the man with the rake; an interest this in which all present, less or more, participated.

For a long while this search also was fruitless.  More than half the area had been gone over, and there was yet no appearance of my lost treasure.

At length, however—­oh! how shall I describe the joy I felt?—­a sweep of the rake threw the well-known pocket-book on the surface of the sawdust.  I darted on it, clutched it, tore it open, and saw the bank-notes apparently untouched.  I counted them.  They were all there.

“I thought so; I thought we should find it,” said, with a calm smile, the gentleman who had been so instrumental in its recovery.

The whole proceedings of the thief or thieves, so promptly and correctly conjectured by my friend, were now obvious.  Finding that passing it from hand to hand would not avail them, he who was last in possession of it had, on the search commencing, dropt it on the ground, and shuffled it under the sawdust with his foot.