“There now!  Who’d ever think of that?” said Bunting.  “I should say that man ’ud got something on his conscience, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I needn’t stay now,” said Joe’s good-natured friend.  “You show your friends round, Chandler.  You knows the place nearly as well as I do, don’t you?”

He smiled at Joe’s visitors, as if to say good-bye, but it seemed that he could not tear himself away after all.

“Look here,” he said to Bunting.  “In this here little case are the tools of Charles Peace.  I expect you’ve heard of him.”

“I should think I have!” cried Bunting eagerly.

“Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most interesting of all.  Peace was such a wonderful man!  A great inventor they say he would have been, had he been put in the way of it.  Here’s his ladder; you see it folds up quite compactly, and makes a nice little bundle—­just like a bundle of old sticks any man might have been seen carrying about London in those days without attracting any attention.  Why, it probably helped him to look like an honest working man time and time again, for on being arrested he declared most solemnly he’d always carried that ladder openly under his arm.”

“The daring of that!” cried Bunting.

“Yes, and when the ladder was opened out it could reach from the ground to the second storey of any old house.  And, oh! how clever he was!  Just open one section, and you see the other sections open automatically; so Peace could stand on the ground and force the thing quietly up to any window he wished to reach.  Then he’d go away again, having done his job, with a mere bundle of old wood under his arm!  My word, he was artful!  I wonder if you’ve heard the tale of how Peace once lost a finger.  Well, he guessed the constables were instructed to look out for a man missing a finger; so what did he do?”

“Put on a false finger,” suggested Bunting.

“No, indeed!  Peace made up his mind just to do without a hand altogether.  Here’s his false stump:  you see, it’s made of wood —­wood and black felt?  Well, that just held his hand nicely.  Why, we considers that one of the most ingenious contrivances in the whole museum.”

Meanwhile, Daisy had let go her hold of her father.  With Chandler in delighted attendance, she had moved away to the farther end of the great room, and now she was bending over yet another glass case.  “Whatever are those little bottles for?” she asked wonderingly.

There were five small phials, filled with varying quantities of cloudy liquids.

“They’re full of poison, Miss Daisy, that’s what they are.  There’s enough arsenic in that little whack o’ brandy to do for you and me —­aye, and for your father as well, I should say.”

“Then chemists shouldn’t sell such stuff,” said Daisy, smiling.  Poison was so remote from herself, that the sight of these little bottles only brought a pleasant thrill.