I should have made my escape at once; but for what I heard the officer say about the men who were waiting outside.  Were they waiting near or at a distance?  Were they on the watch at the front or the back of the house?  I thought it highly desirable to give myself a chance of ascertaining their whereabouts from the talk of the officers in the next room, before I risked the possibility of running right into their clutches on the outer side of the door.

I cautiously opened the peephole once more.

The doctor appeared to be still on the most friendly terms with his vigilant guardians from Bow Street.

“Have you any objection to my ringing for some lunch, before we are all taken off to London together?” I heard him ask in his most cheerful tones.  “A glass of wine and a bit of bread and cheese won’t do you any harm, gentlemen, if you are as hungry as I am.”

“If you want to eat and drink, order the victuals at once,” replied one of the runners, sulkily.  “We don’t happen to want anything ourselves.”

“Sorry for it,” said the doctor.  “I have some of the best old Madeira in England.”

“Like enough,” retorted the officer sarcastically.  “But you see we are not quite such fools as we look; and we have heard of such a thing, in our time, as hocussed wine.”

“O fie! fie!” exclaimed the doctor merrily.  “Remember how well I am behaving myself, and don’t wound my feelings by suspecting me of such shocking treachery as that!”

He moved to a corner of the room behind him, and touched a knob in the wall which I had never before observed.  A bell rang directly, which had a new tone in it to my ears.

“Too bad,” said the doctor, turning round again to the runners; “really too bad, gentlemen, to suspect me of that!”

Shaking his head deprecatingly, he moved back to the corner, pulled aside something in the wall, disclosed the mouth of a pipe which was a perfect novelty to me, and called down it.

“Moses!”

It was the first time I had heard that name in the house.

“Who is Moses?” inquired the officers both together, advancing on him suspiciously.

“Only my servant,” answered the doctor.  He turned once more to the pipe, and called down it: 

“Bring up the Stilton Cheese, and a bottle of the Old Madeira.”

The cheese we had in use at that time was of purely Dutch extraction.  I remembered Port, Sherry, and Claret in my palmy dinner-days at the doctor’s family-table; but certainly not Old Madeira.  Perhaps he selfishly kept his best wine and his choicest cheese for his own consumption.

“Sam,” said one of the runners to the other, “you look to our civil friend here, and I’ll grab Moses when he brings up the lunch.”

“Would you like to see what the operation of coining is, while my man is getting the lunch ready?” said the doctor.  “It may be of use to me at the trial, if you can testify that I afforded you every facility for finding out anything you might want to know.  Only mention my polite anxiety to make things easy and instructive from the very first, and I may get recommended to mercy.  See here—­this queer-looking machine, gentlemen (from which two of my men derive their nicknames), is what we call a Mill-and-Screw.”