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Another cat I had used to get drunk regularly every day. She would hang about for hours outside the cellar door for the purpose of sneaking in on the first opportunity and lapping up the drippings from the beer-cask. I do not mention this habit of hers in praise of the species, but merely to show how almost human some of them are.

"Ha!" exclaimed Mr Sharp again. After revolving the matter in his mind for some minutes, and consulting with his satellite, Mr Sharp resolved to go down at once to the place and watch the beer-cask. "It is not very late yet," he said, "and these thirsty boys will be sure to want a drop of beer to their supper to-night. What makes you so sure that Bill Jones is the thief?"

It lay under the shadow of a beer-cask the servants' beer a fresh cask which, having arrived late that evening, had not been relegated to the cellar. The only other individual who slept on the basement was the footman. That worthy, being elderly and feeble, though bold as a lion, had been doomed to the lower regions by his mistress, as a sure protection against burglars.

Blows went, and returned in tears, and for two entire days her husband, a prey to gloom, sat trying to evolve fresh and original ideas for the possession of the money. On the evening of the second day he became low-spirited, and going down to the kitchen took a glass from the dresser and sat down by the beer-cask. Almost insensibly he began to take a brighter view of things.

Blows went, and returned in tears, and for two entire days her husband, a prey to gloom, sat trying to evolve fresh and original ideas for the possession of the money. On the evening of the second day he became low-spirited, and going down to the kitchen took a glass from the dresser and sat down by the beer-cask. Almost insensibly he began to take a brighter view of things.

Not satisfied with what he had already accomplished, Mr Sharp then returned to his office, where he found the faithful Blunt awaiting him, to whom he related briefly what he had done. "Now," said he, in conclusion, "if we can only manage to clear up that case of the beer-cask, we shall have done a good stroke of business to-day. Have you found out anything in regard to it?"

Travers generating the hydrogen for their wonderful experiments in an old beer-cask. Professor Ramsay himself is a tall, rather spare man, just entering the gray stage of life, with the earnest visage of the scholar, the keen, piercing eye of the investigator yet not without a twinkle that justifies the lineage of the "canny Scot."

Then it occurred to him that this very gap was now superfluous. In the stands of the cellar were several casks, large and small, either empty or full of beer and wine. He rolled one of the empty casks below the hole in the ceiling, and turned it upside down. Then he stove in the top of a beer-cask and dipped into it the cushion, allowing the beer to well soak through it.

His usual auditors were the keeper of the café, a stupid and silent beer-cask, always in his sleeved vest, and remarkable only for his carved pipe; the bailiff, a scoffer, dressed invariably in black, scorned for his inelegant habit of carrying off what remained of his sugar; the town-clerk, the gentleman of acrostics, a person of much amiability and a feeble constitution, who sent to the illustrated journals solutions of enigmas and rebuses; and, lastly, the veterinary surgeon of the place, the only one who, from his position of atheist and democrat, was allowed to contradict the Captain.

Mop's fiddle thereupon emitted an elfin shriek of finality; stepping quickly down from the nine-gallon beer-cask which had formed his rostrum, he went to the little girl, who disconsolately bent over her mother.