r answered unhesitatingly; and yet the expert assured her that
very few houses were robbed without connivance from within.

The servants were had up and questioned, and the cook related how,
coming down first thing in the morning, she had found a certain back
scullery window open, and, alarmed by that, had examined the lower
rooms, and found the dining-room table set out with the decanters and
glasses. Having heard her story, the officer, as soon as she left the
room, asked my mother if any thing else besides the money had been
taken, and if any quantity of the wine had been drank. She said, "No,"
and with regard to the last inquiry, she supposed, as the cook had
suggested when the decanters were examined, that the thieves had
probably been disturbed by some alarm, and had not had time to drink
much.

Mr. Salmon then requested to look at the kitchen premises; the cook
officiously led the way to the scullery window, which was still open,
"just as she found it," she said, and proceeded to explain how the
robbers must have got over the wall of a court which ran at the back of
the house. When she had ended her demonstrations and returned to the
kitchen, Salmon, who had listened silently to her story of the case,
detained my mother for an instant, and rapidly passed his hand over the
outside window-sill, bringing away a thick layer of undisturbed dust,
which the passage of anybody through the window must infallibly have
swept off. Satisfied at once of the total falsity of the cook's
hypothesis, he told my mother that he had no doubt at all that she was a
party to the robbery, that the scullery window and dining-room drinking
scene were alike mere blinds, and that in all probability she had let
into the house whoever had broken open the desk, or else forced it
herself, having acquired by some means a knowledge of the money it
contained; adding, that in the very few words of interrogatory which had
passed between him and the servants, in my mother's presence, he had
felt quite sure that the housemaid and man were innocent; but had
immediately detected something in the cook's manner that seemed to him
suspicious. What a fine tact of guilt these detectives acquire in their
immense experience of it! The cook was not prosecuted, but dismissed,
the money, of course, not being recoverable; it was fortunate that
neither she nor her honest friends had any suspicion of the contents of
three boxes lying in the drawing-room at this very