As for the walls, they were covered with the queerest-looking objects; bits of old iron, odd-looking things made of wood and leather, and so on.

It was really rather disappointing.

Then Daisy Bunting gradually became aware that standing on a shelf just below the first of the broad, spacious windows which made the great room look so light and shadowless, was a row of life-size white plaster heads, each head slightly inclined to the right.  There were about a dozen of these, not more—­and they had such odd, staring, helpless, real-looking faces.

“Whatever’s those?” asked Bunting in a low voice.

Daisy clung a thought closer to her father’s arm.  Even she guessed that these strange, pathetic, staring faces were the death-masks of those men and women who had fulfilled the awful law which ordains that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to death.

“All hanged!” said the guardian of the Black Museum briefly.  “Casts taken after death.”

Bunting smiled nervously.  “They don’t look dead somehow.  They looks more as if they were listening,” he said.

“That’s the fault of Jack Ketch,” said the man facetiously.  “It’s his idea—­that of knotting his patient’s necktie under the left ear!  That’s what he does to each of the gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on just one occasion only.  It makes them lean just a bit to one side.  You look here—?”

Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the speaker pointed with his finger to a little dent imprinted on the left side of each neck; running from this indentation was a curious little furrow, well ridged above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch’s necktie had been drawn when its wearer was hurried through the gates of eternity.

“They looks foolish-like, rather than terrified, or—­or hurt,” said Bunting wonderingly.

He was extraordinarily moved and fascinated by those dumb, staring faces.

But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, “Well, a man would look foolish at such a time as that, with all his plans brought to naught—­and knowing he’s only got a second to live —­now wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he would,” said Bunting slowly.

Daisy had gone a little pale.  The sinister, breathless atmosphere of the place was beginning to tell on her.  She now began to understand that the shabby little objects lying there in the glass case close to her were each and all links in the chain of evidence which, in almost every case, had brought some guilty man or woman to the gallows.

“We had a yellow gentleman here the other day,” observed the guardian suddenly; “one of those Brahmins—­so they calls themselves.  Well, you’d a been quite surprised to see how that heathen took on!  He declared—­what was the word he used?”—­he turned to Chandler.

“He said that each of these things, with the exception of the casts, mind you—­queer to say, he left them out—­exuded evil, that was the word he used!  Exuded—­squeezed out it means.  He said that being here made him feel very bad.  And twasn’t all nonsense either.  He turned quite green under his yellow skin, and we had to shove him out quick.  He didn’t feel better till he’d got right to the other end of the passage!”