let
and other jewelry are unearthed, and it is decided to take the bracelet
to Amsterdam and offer it to the diamond cutters at that place. But
the carrying of the bracelet is both difficult and dangerous. How the
mission is brought to a conclusion, and what part the Lascars played in
the final adventure, will be found in the pages that follow.

It can truthfully be said that Mr. Henty is easily the most popular of
all English story tellers, his books for boys enjoying a circulation of
from a hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand per
year. His tales are all clean, and although some are full of exciting
situations and thrilling to the last degree, they are of a high moral
tone, while the English employed is of the best.

The present story is of peculiar value as giving a good insight into
country and town life in England over a hundred years ago, when railways
and telegraph lines were unknown and when the "knights of the road" were
apt to hold up any stagecoach that happened to come along. It also gives
a truthful picture of the dark and underhanded work accomplished at
times by those of East Indian blood, especially when on what they
consider a religious mission.

CHAPTER I.

Squire Thorndyke, of the Manor House of Crawley, was, on the 1st of
September; 1782, walking up and down the little terrace in front of the
quaint old house in an unusually disturbed mood. He was a man of forty
three or four, stoutly and strongly built, and inclined to be portly.
Save the loss of his wife four years before, there had been but little
to ruffle the easy tenor of his life. A younger son, he had, at his
mother's death, when he was three and twenty, come in for the small
estate at Crawley, which had been her jointure.

For ten years he had led a life resembling that of most of his
neighbors; he had hunted and shot, been a regular attendant at any
main of cocks that was fought within fifteen miles of Crawley, had
occasionally been up to London for a week or two to see the gay doings
there. Of an evening he had generally gone down to the inn, where he
talked over, with two or three of his own condition and a few of the
better class of farmers, the news of the day, the war with the French,
the troubles in Scotland, the alarming march of the Young Pretender, and
his defeat at Culloden--with no very keen interest in the result, for
the Southern gentry and yeomen, unlike those in the North, had no strong
l