reign Missions."

"Good!" said Holmes. "That's what I've done with my share. See!"

And he showed me an evening paper in which the board conveyed its
acknowledgment of the generosity of an unknown donor of the princely sum of
$15,000.

VII
THE REDEMPTION OF YOUNG BILLINGTON RAND

"Jenkins," said Raffles Holmes, lighting his pipe and throwing himself down
upon my couch, "don't you sometimes pine for those good old days of Jack
Sheppard and Dick Turpin? Hang it all--I'm getting blisteringly tired of the
modern refinements in crime, and yearn for the period when the highwayman
met you on the road and made you stand and deliver at the point of the
pistol."

"Indeed I don't!" I ejaculated. "I'm not chicken-livered, Raffles, but I'm
mighty glad my lines are cast in less strenuous scenes. When a book-agent
comes in here, for instance, and holds me up for nineteen dollars a volume
for a set of Kipling in words of one syllable, illustrated by his aunt, and
every volume autographed by his uncle's step-sister, it's a game of wits
between us as to whether I shall buy or not buy, and if he gets away with my
signature to a contract it is because he has legitimately outwitted me. But
your ancient Turpin overcame you by brute force; you hadn't a run for your
money from the moment he got his eye on you, and no percentage of the swag
was ever returned to you has in the case of the Double-Cross Edition of
Kipling, in which you get at least fifty cents worth of paper and print for
every nineteen dollars you give up."

"That is merely the commercial way of looking at it," protested Holmes. "You
reckon up the situation on a basis of mere dollars, strike a balance and
charge the thing up to profit and loss. But the romance of it all, the
element of the picturesque, the delicious, tingling sense of adventure which
was inseparable from a road experience with a commanding personality like
Turpin--these things are all lost in your prosaic book-agent methods of our
day. No man writing his memoirs for the enlightenment of posterity would
ever dream of setting down upon paper the story of how a book-agent robbed
him of two-hundred dollars, but the chap who has been held up in the dark
recesses of a forest on a foggy night by a Jack Sheppard would always find
breathless and eager listeners to or readers of the tale he had to tell,
even if he lost only a nickel by the transaction."

"Well, old man," said I, "I'm satisfied with the prosaic m