-buttons, His Lordship deciding at length that the second
gardener had been punished enough for his theft by being dumped into
the creek. They all echoed Holmes's slogan of: "Seven, come eleven!"
for the recovery of the four remaining gems; and after an evening
spent in listening to Lord Launcelot play the mandolin, and to Uncle
Tooter telling some more extravagant tales of his adventures in India,
we retired at ten o'clock, and I soon fell asleep.

Then I dreamed that I was back in the United States, on a Mississippi
River levee, throwing dice with several colored boys, who kept
shouting: "Seven, come eleven!" when Hemlock Holmes came along and
pinched us all for crap-shooting!

CHAPTER XV

Thursday morning, April the eleventh, found us none the worse for our
wetting in the creek the afternoon before; and as Holmes and I were
dressing in our room, he loudly boasted that before another day had
passed he would succeed in finding the four remaining diamond
cuff-buttons.

"Well, I hope so, Holmes; only I can't help thinking what a supreme
chump that Earl is for keeping those five servants of his from whom
you extracted the first seven cuff-buttons,--Yensen, Thorneycroft,
Galetchkoff, Bunbury, and Xanthopoulos!" I said; "because at any time
they are liable to steal the darned cuff-buttons again. Then there's
Vermicelli, who was mixed up in the plot with the Greek, and the
Countess herself!"

"What of it, Doc?" grinned Holmes, as he bent down to lace his shoes.
"His Nibs can't very well fire _her_, can he? And as to the five
servants whom he has so mercifully retained, that's _his_ funeral, not
ours. I was hired at an exorbitant fee to get back the cuff-buttons,
and when I have done so my duties end. Handing out free advice to
people who have not asked for it generally doesn't get you anything, I
have observed."

I subsided, knowing from long experience how bull-headed Holmes was,
and we went downstairs to breakfast, at which meal the Earl and
Countess both did the honors to the assembled party. It developed then
that Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed, in spite of his nap on the
billiard-table the day before, had also bestirred himself in an
eleventh hour attempt to find some of the cuff-buttons before Holmes
dug them all up, and he told us how he had been all through the
servants' rooms on the fifth floor, rummaging in their dressers and
clothes-closets, and peeking under the beds, in a vain endeavor to
unearth