s of
inflammable material is heaped together, sometimes it will suddenly
burst into flame and burn up all in a minute, without anything or
anybody setting fire to it. This is just what happened to Krook. As he
stood in the middle of the dirty shop, without any warning, all in a
twinkling, he blazed up and burned, clothes and all, and in less time
than it takes to tell it, there was nothing left but a little pile of
ashes, a burnt mark in the floor and a sticky smoke that stuck to the
window-panes and hung in the air like soot. And this was all the
neighbors found when they came to search for him.

This was the end of Krook, and the rag-and-bottle shop was taken
possession of by Grandfather Smallweed, a hideous, crippled
money-lender, who had been his brother-in-law, and who at once went to
work ransacking all the papers he could find on the premises.

Grandfather Smallweed was a thin, toothless, wheezy, green-eyed old
miser, who was so nearly dead from age and asthma that he had to be
wheeled about by his granddaughter Judy.

He had a wife who was out of her mind. Everything said in her hearing
she connected with the idea of money. If one said, for example, "It's
twenty minutes past noon," Mrs. Smallweed would at once begin to gabble:
"Twenty pence! Twenty pounds! Twenty thousand millions of bank-notes
locked up in a black box!" and she would not stop till her husband threw
a cushion at her (which he kept beside him for that very purpose) and
knocked her mouth shut.

Grandfather Smallweed soon discovered the bundle of letters hidden back
of the shelf where Lady Jane, Krook's big cat, slept.

The name they bore, "Captain Hawdon," was familiar enough to the
money-lender. Long ago, when Hawdon was living a dissipated life in
London, he had borrowed money from Grandfather Smallweed, and this money
was still unpaid when he had disappeared. It was said that he had fallen
overboard from a vessel and had been drowned.

To think now that the captain had been living as a copyist all these
years in London, free from arrest for the debt, filled the wizened soul
of the old man with rage. He was ready enough to talk when Mr.
Tulkinghorn questioned him, and finally sold him the bundle of letters.

The lawyer saw that they were in Lady Dedlock's penmanship; it remained
to prove that the dead Nemo had really been Captain Hawdon.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, of course, had many specimens of the copyist's hand,
and after much search he foun