my curiosity.
That it could be opened, and in some ingenious manner, I made no
doubt--but how?

The box was not a new one. At a rough guess I should say that it had been
a box for a good half century; there were certain signs of age about it
which could not escape a practiced eye. Had it remained unopened all that
time? When opened, what would be found inside? It _sounded_ hollow;
probably nothing at all--who could tell?

It was formed of small pieces of inlaid wood. Several woods had been used;
some of them were strange to me. They were of different colors; it was
pretty obvious that they must all of them have been hard woods. The pieces
were of various shapes--hexagonal, octagonal, triangular, square, oblong,
and even circular. The process of inlaying them had been beautifully done.
So nicely had the parts been joined that the lines of meeting were
difficult to discover with the naked eye; they had been joined solid, so
to speak. It was an excellent example of marquetry. I had been over-hasty
in my deprecation; I owed as much to Pugh.

"This box of yours is better worth looking at than I first supposed. Is it
to be sold?"

"No, it is not to be sold. Nor"--he "fixed" me with his spectacles--"is it
to be given away. I have brought it to you for the simple purpose of
ascertaining if you have ingenuity enough to open it."

"I will engage to open it in two seconds--with a hammer."

"I dare say. _I_ will open it with a hammer. The thing is to open it
without."

"Let me see." I began, with the aid of a microscope, to examine the box
more closely. "I will give you one piece of information, Pugh. Unless I am
mistaken, the secret lies in one of these little pieces of inlaid wood.
You push it, or you press it, or something, and the whole affair flies
open."

"Such was my own first conviction. I am not so sure of it now. I have
pressed every separate piece of wood; I have tried to move each piece in
every direction. No result has followed. My theory was a hidden spring."

"But there must be a hidden spring of some sort, unless you are to open it
by a mere exercise of force. I suppose the box is empty."

"I thought it was at first, but now I am not so sure of that either. It
all depends on the position in which you hold it. Hold it in this
position--like this--close to your ear. Have you a small hammer?" I took a
small hammer. "Tap it softly, with the hammer. Don't you notice a sort of
reverberation within?"

Pugh wa