Brought forward..................................£1   4   0
                               Pen and paper.........................  0   0   6
                               Blotting-paper..........................  0   0   6
                               Messenger to Paternoster-
                                  row and back........................  0   1   6
                               Again, when No Answer............ 0   1   6
                               Brandy 2s., Devilled
                                 Pork chop 2s........................... 0   4   0
                               Pens and paper........................ 0   1   0
                               Messenger to Albemarle-
                                 street and back....................... 0   1   0
                               Again (detained), when
                                 No Answer............................... 0   1   6
                               Saltcellar broken....................... 0   3   6
                               Large Liqueur- glass
                                 Orange Brandy....................... 0   1   6
                               Dinner, Soup Fish Joint
                                 and bird................................... 0   7   6
                               Bottle old East India
                                 Brown...................................... 0   8   0
                               Pen and paper.......................... 0   0   6
                                                                                 ————
                                                                               £2  16   6

Mem.: January 1st, 1857. He went out after
dinner, directing Luggage to be ready when he
called for it. Never called.

So far from throwing a light upon the subject,
this bill appeared to me, if I may so express my
doubts, to involve it in a yet more lurid halo.
Speculating it over with the Mistress, she
informed me that the luggage had been advertised
in the Master's time as being to be sold after
such and such a day to pay expenses, but no
further steps had been taken. (I may here
remark that the Mistress is a widow in her
fourth year. The Master was possessed of one
of those unfortunate constitutions in which
Spirits turns to Water, and rises in the
ill-starred Victim.)

My speculating it over, not then only but
repeatedly, sometimes with the Mistress,
sometimes with one, sometimes with another, led up
to the Mistress's saying to me—whether at first
in joke or in earnest, or half joke and half
earnest, it matters not:

"Christopher, I am going to make you a
handsome offer."

(If this should meet her eye––a lovely blue––
may she not take it ill my mentioning that if I
had been eight or ten year younger, I would
have done as much by her! That is, I would
have made her a offer. It is for others than me
to denominate it a handsome one.)

"Christopher, I am going to make you a
handsome offer."

"Put a name to it, ma'am."

"Look here, Christopher. Run over the
articles of Somebody's Luggage. You've got it
all by heart, I know."

"A black portmanteau, ma'am, a black bag, a
desk, a dressing-case, a brown-paper parcel, a hat-
box, and an umbrella strapped to a walking-stick."

"All just as they were left. Nothing opened,
nothing tampered with."

"You are right, ma'am. All locked but the
brown-paper parcel, and that sealed."

The Mistress was leaning on Miss Martin's
desk at the bar-window, and she taps the open
book that lays upon the desk––she has a pretty-
made hand, to be sure and bobs her head over
it, and laughs.

"Come," says she, "Christopher. Pay me
Somebody's bill, and you shall have Somebody's
luggage."

I rather took to the idea from the first
moment; but,

"It mayn't be worth the money," I objected,
seeming to hold back.

"That's a Lottery," says the Mistress, folding
her arms upon the book––it ain't her hands
alone that's pretty made: the observation
extends right up her arms––"Won't you venture
two pound sixteen shillings and sixpence in the
Lottery? Why, there's no blanks!" says the
Mistress, laughing and bobbing her head again,
"you must win. If you lose, you must win!
All prizes in this Lottery! Draw a blank, and
remember, Gentlemen-Sportsmen, you'll still be
entitled to a black portmanteau, a black bag, a
desk, a dressing-case, a sheet of brown paper,
a hat-box, and an umbrella strapped to a
walking-stick!"

To make short of it, Miss Martin come round
me, and Mrs. Pratchett come round me, and the
Mistress she was completely round me already,
and all the women in the house come round
me, and if it had been Sixteen two instead of
Two sixteen, I should have thought myself well
out of it. For what can you do when they do
come round you?

So I paid the money––down––and such a
laughing as there was among 'em! But I
turned the tables on 'em regularly, when I said:

"My family-name is Blue Beard. I'm going
to open Somebody's Luggage all alone in the
Secret Chamber, and not a female eye catches
sight of the contents!"

Whether I thought proper to have the firmness
to keep to this, don't signify, or whether
any female eye, and if any how many, was really
present when the opening of the Luggage came
off. Somebody's Luggage is the question at
present: Nobody's eyes, nor yet noses.

What I still look at most, in connexion with
that Luggage, is the extraordinary quantity of
writing-paper, and all written on! And not our
paper neither––not the paper charged in the
bill, for we know our paper––so he must have
been always at it. And he had crumpled
up this writing of his, everywhere, in every
part and parcel of his luggage. There was
writing in his dressing-case, writing in his boots,
writing among his shaving-tackle, writing in his
hat-box, writing folded away down among the
very whalebones of his umbrella.

His clothes wasn't bad, what there was of 'em.
His dressing-case was poor––not a particle of
silver stopper—bottle apertures with nothing in
'em, like empty little dog-kennels––and a most
searching description of tooth-powder diffusing
itself around, as under a deluded mistake that
all the chinks in the fittings was divisions in
teeth. His clothes I parted with, well enough,
to a second-hand dealer not far from St.
Clement's Danes, in the Strand––him as the officers