“It was an interesting fact but not very applicable to present circumstances.  Still, it set me thinking.  I went into the front room and glanced out of the open window.  A faint lightening of the murky sky heralded the approach of dawn, and from afar came the murmur of commencing traffic out in High Street.  I was about to turn away when my ear caught a new and unusual sound rising above that distant murmur; the measured tread of feet mingling with the clatter of horses’ hoofs and a heavy, metallic rumbling.  I looked out cautiously in the direction whence the sounds came and was positively stupefied with amazement.  At the end of the street I saw, by the light of the lamps, a company of soldiers appearing round the corner and taking up a position across the road.  I watched breathlessly.  Soon, at a sign from the officer, the men spread mats on the muddy ground and lay down on them, and then appeared a train of horses, dragging a field-piece or quick-firing gun, which was halted behind the infantry and unlimbered.  A minute later the black shapes of a number of soldiers appeared on the sky-line as they crept along the parapets of the opposite houses where, save for their heads and the barrels of their rifles, they presently disappeared.

“It seemed that I had misjudged the police in the matter of caution.  It almost seemed that my labors had been useless; for surely these portentous preparations indicated some masterpiece of strategy.  What an anticlimax it would be when the defenders of the fort were found to be dead!  But what a still greater anticlimax if they were not there at all!

“At this moment a police sergeant strolled down the middle of the road and, observing me, motioned to me with his hand to get inside out of harm’s way.  I obeyed with grim amusement, thinking of that absurd anticlimax; and somehow this idea began to connect itself with those two bottom drawers.  But the casks were the difficulty.  The cooper from whom I had obtained them sometimes kept me waiting nearly a week before supplying them—­for I was only a small customer; and that would never do even at this time of year.  Besides, the police would make a rigid search; not that that would have mattered if I could have made proper arrangements for the concealment and removal of the specimens.  But unfortunately I could not.  The specimens would have to go; to be borne out ingloriously in the face of the besieging force, limp and passive, like a couple of those very helpless guys that are wont to be produced by what Mrs. Kosminsky would call ‘der chiltrens.’  There would be a certain grim appropriateness in the incident.  For this was the fifth of November.