l was unduly trying, and Raffles created a noble
diversion by calling attention to an early photograph of himself,
which may still hang on the wall over the historic chest, but which I
had carefully ignored. It shows him in flannels, after some great feat
upon the tented field. I am afraid there is a Sullivan between his
lips, a look of lazy insolence in the half-shut eyes. I have since
possessed myself of a copy, and it is not Raffles at his best; but the
features are clean-cut and regular; and I often wish that I had lent
it to the artistic gentlemen who have battered the statue out of all
likeness to the man.

[Illustration: No one can make out what this little thick velvet bag's
for.]

"You wouldn't think it of him, would you?" quoth the clerk. "It makes
you understand how no one ever did think it of him at the time."

The youth was looking full at Raffles, with the watery eyes of
unsuspecting innocence. I itched to emulate the fine bravado of my
friend.

"You said he had a pal," I observed, sinking deeper into the collar of
my coat. "Haven't you got a photograph of him?"

The pale clerk gave such a sickly smile, I could have smacked some
blood into his pasty face.

"You mean Bunny?" said the familiar fellow. "No, sir, he'd be out of
place; we've only room for real criminals here. Bunny was neither one
thing nor the other. He could follow Raffles, but that's all he could
do. He was no good on his own. Even when he put up the low-down job of
robbing his old 'ome, it's believed he hadn't the 'eart to take the
stuff away, and Raffles had to break in a second time for it. No, sir,
we don't bother our heads about Bunny; we shall never hear no more of
'im. He was a harmless sort of rotter, if you awsk me."

I had not asked him, and I was almost foaming under the respirator
that I was making of my overcoat collar. I only hoped that Raffles
would say something, and he did.

"The only case I remember anything about," he remarked, tapping the
clamped chest with his umbrella, "was this; and that time, at all
events, the man outside must have had quite as much to do as the one
inside. May I ask what you keep in it?"

"Nothing, sir."

"I imagined more relics inside. Hadn't he some dodge of getting in and
out without opening the lid?"

"Of putting his head out, you mean," returned the clerk, whose
knowledge of Raffles and his Relics was really most comprehensive on
the whole. He moved some of the minor memorials an