Mr. Salmon then requested to look at the kitchen premises; the cook officiously led the way to the scullery window, which was still open, “just as she found it,” she said, and proceeded to explain how the robbers must have got over the wall of a court which ran at the back of the house.  When she had ended her demonstrations and returned to the kitchen, Salmon, who had listened silently to her story of the case, detained my mother for an instant, and rapidly passed his hand over the outside window-sill, bringing away a thick layer of undisturbed dust, which the passage of anybody through the window must infallibly have swept off.  Satisfied at once of the total falsity of the cook’s hypothesis, he told my mother that he had no doubt at all that she was a party to the robbery, that the scullery window and dining-room drinking scene were alike mere blinds, and that in all probability she had let into the house whoever had broken open the desk, or else forced it herself, having acquired by some means a knowledge of the money it contained; adding, that in the very few words of interrogatory which had passed between him and the servants, in my mother’s presence, he had felt quite sure that the housemaid and man were innocent; but had immediately detected something in the cook’s manner that seemed to him suspicious.  What a fine tact of guilt these detectives acquire in their immense experience of it!  The cook was not prosecuted, but dismissed, the money, of course, not being recoverable; it was fortunate that neither she nor her honest friends had any suspicion of the contents of three boxes lying in the drawing-room at this very time.  They were large, black leather cases, containing a silver helmet, shield, and sword, of antique Roman pattern and beautiful workmanship—­a public tribute bestowed upon my uncle, and left by him to my father; they have since become an ornamental trophy in my sister’s house.  They were then about to be sent for safe keeping to Coutts’s bank, and in the meantime lay close to the desk that had been rifled of a more portable but far less valuable booty.

Upon my uncle John’s death his widow had returned to England, and fixed her residence at a charming place called Heath Farm, in Hertfordshire.  Lord Essex had been an attached friend of my uncle’s, and offered this home on his property to Mrs. Kemble when she came to England, after her long sojourn abroad with my uncle, who, as I have mentioned, spent the last years of his life, and died, at Lausanne.  Mrs. Kemble invited my mother to come and see her soon after she settled in Hertfordshire, and I accompanied her thither.  Cashiobury Park thus became familiar ground to me, and remains endeared to my recollection for its own beauty, for the delightful days I passed rambling about it, and for the beginning of that love bestowed upon my whole life by H——­ S——.  Heath Farm was a pretty house, at once rural, comfortable, and elegant, with a fine farm-yard adjoining it, a sort of cross between a farm