“Den ve are ruint!” cried Shylock, displaying his palms, and showing by that act a select assortment of diamond rings.

“Oh,” laughed the stranger, “that is a simple matter.  Captain Kidd has gone to London.”

“To London!” cried several members at once.  “How do you know that?”

“By this,” said the stranger, holding up the tiny stub end of a cigar.

“Tut-tut!” ejaculated Solomon.  “What child’s play this is!”

“No, your Majesty,” observed the stranger, “it is not child’s play; it is fact.  That cigar end was thrown aside here on the wharf by Captain Kidd just before he stepped on board the House-boat.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Raleigh.  “And granting the truth of the assertion, what does it prove?”

“I will tell you,” said the stranger.  And he at once proceeded as follows.

II

THE STRANGER UNRAVELS A MYSTERY AND REVEALS HIMSELF

“I have made a hobby of the study of cigar ends,” said the stranger, as the Associated Shades settled back to hear his account of himself.  “From my earliest youth, when I used surreptitiously to remove the unsmoked ends of my father’s cigars and break them up, and, in hiding, smoke them in an old clay pipe which I had presented to me by an ancient sea-captain of my acquaintance, I have been interested in tobacco in all forms, even including these self-same despised unsmoked ends; for they convey to my mind messages, sentiments, farces, comedies, and tragedies which to your minds would never become manifest through their agency.”

The company drew closer together and formed themselves in a more compact mass about the speaker.  It was evident that they were beginning to feel an unusual interest in this extraordinary person, who had come among them unheralded and unknown.  Even Shylock stopped calculating percentages for an instant to listen.

“Do you mean to tell us,” demanded Shakespeare, “that the unsmoked stub of a cigar will suggest the story of him who smoked it to your mind?”

“I do,” replied the stranger, with a confident smile.  “Take this one, for instance, that I have picked up here upon the wharf; it tells me the whole story of the intentions of Captain Kidd at the moment when, in utter disregard of your rights, he stepped aboard your House-boat, and, in his usual piratical fashion, made off with it into unknown seas.”

“But how do you know he smoked it?” asked Solomon, who deemed it the part of wisdom to be suspicious of the stranger.