My first duty is to draw up a full statement of the instructions I have received from Sergeant Bulmer.  Here they are at your service, according to my version of them.

At Number Thirteen, Rutherford Street, Soho, there is a stationer’s shop.  It is kept by one Mr. Yatman.  He is a married man, but has no family.  Besides Mr. and Mrs. Yatman, the other inmates of the house are a lodger, a young single man named Jay, who occupies the front room on the second floor,—­a shopman, who sleeps in one of the attics,—­and a servant-of-all-work, whose bed is in the back-kitchen.  Once a week a charwoman comes to help this servant.  These are all the persons who, on ordinary occasions, have means of access to the interior of the house, placed, as a matter of course, at their disposal.

Mr. Yatman has been in business for many years,—­carrying on his affairs prosperously enough to realize a handsome independence for a person in his position.  Unfortunately for himself, he endeavored to increase the amount of his property by speculating.  He ventured boldly in his investments, luck went against him, and rather less than two years ago he found himself a poor man again.  All that was saved out of the wreck of his property was the sum of two hundred pounds.

Although Mr. Yatman did his best to meet his altered circumstances, by giving up many of the luxuries and comforts to which he and his wife had been accustomed, he found it impossible to retrench so far as to allow of putting by any money from the income produced by his shop.  The business has been declining of late years,—­the cheap advertising stationers having done it injury with the public.  Consequently, up to the last week, the only surplus property possessed by Mr. Yatman consisted of the two hundred pounds which had been recovered from the wreck of his fortune.  This sum was placed as a deposit in a joint-stock bank of the highest possible character.

Eight days ago, Mr. Yatman and his lodger, Mr. Jay, held a conversation together on the subject of the commercial difficulties, which are hampering trade in all directions at the present time.  Mr. Jay (who lives by supplying the newspapers with short paragraphs relating to accidents, offences, and brief records of remarkable occurrences in general,—­who is, in short, what they call a penny-a-liner) told his landlord that he had been in the city that day, and heard unfavorable rumors on the subject of the joint-stock banks.  The rumors to which he alluded had already reached the ears of Mr. Yatman from other quarters; and the confirmation of them by his lodger had such an effect on his mind,—­predisposed, as it was, to alarm, by the experience of his former losses,—­that he resolved to go at once to the bank and withdraw his deposit.  It was then getting on toward the end of the afternoon; and he arrived just in time to receive his money before the bank closed.