One will have an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl sleeve-links, while he passes over the most elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links, placed about in the most conspicuous locations.  Another will impede his flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic.  The specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than of any brightness of business habits; but there is one kind of depredator to whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply.  I allude to our fellow-citizen the housebreaker.

“It has been maintained by some of our boldest young truth-seekers, that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden wall could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a fork that is insulated in a locked box under the butler’s bed.  They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science on this point.  They declare that diamond links are not left about in conspicuous locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as they were in the great test experiment of Calypso College.  We hope this experiment here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge, and will bring the burglar once more into line and union with his fellow criminals.”

Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in explosive enlightenment.

“Oh, I see!” he cried; “you mean that Smith is a burglar.”

“I thought I made it quite ad’quately lucid,” said Mr. Pym, folding up his eyelids.  It was typical of this topsy-turvy private trial that all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression on either side, was exasperating and unintelligible to the other.  Moon could not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization.  Pym could not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.

“All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,” continued the American doctor, “are cases of burglary.  Pursuing the same course as in the previous case, we select the indubitable instance from the rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron evidence.  I will now call on my colleague, Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from the earnest, unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins.”

Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from the earnest and unspotted Hawkins.  Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard well, Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists.  But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing; indeed, the sense of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when, a little later, it was handed across the table.