have concluded that I had committed some
dreadful crime: for the citation, or whatever it
was, had to be served personally, and the usher
dodged me about, all that afternoon, before he
could succeed in thrusting into my hand a species
of placard, printed on coarse grey paper, and
stamped all over in variously-coloured inks,
bidding me appear on a certain day before the
Judge of Instruction of the First Tribunal of the
Court of Assizes of Brabant, to give preliminary
evidence against Jacobus Hendrik Vanderscamp,
otherwise Gewaert, otherwise "Doppelfanger,"
otherwise "Pinchgelt," otherwise—and to me
eternally—Mynheer van Prig.

I got this citation on a Saturday; on the
Monday—the intermediate day was one of
torture—I attended at ten o'clock in the morning
at the Palais de Justice. In the back yard of that
rambling whitewashed edifice I found a lonely
door, giving access to a flight of filthy stone stairs,
up three flights of which, an attenuated inscription
informed me, were the "Cabinets de MM. les
Juges d'Instruction." Previous to this, I had
been allowed to cool my heels in a dreadful ante-
chamber, much resembling a pauper dead-house;
for it appeared there had been on the preceding
evening a great robbery at a jeweller's in the
Place de la Monnaie, and the Judge of Instruction,
who was to take cognisance of myself
against van Prig, had gone down to the jeweller's
in order to take "informations" on the spot.
I had the pleasure, too, of meeting the little
policeman, who called my miserable matter
"l'affaire de la Porte de Cologne," making
as much of it as though it had been a
gunpowder plot; and who in a whisper informed me
that van Prig had "arrived" and was "là-bas,"
indicating the locked door of a seeming coal-
cellar. He also obligingly opened the door of the
prisoners' van, which, having discharged its
passengers, was waiting in the court-yard, and
explained its internal economy to me. We groped
about the narrow corridor of the carriage, and
with a shudder I peeped into the cupboard with
its narrow seat and a ventilator in the roof,
which, but half an hour since, had held the
captive body of Mynheer van Prig.

The tinkling of a little bell at length
summoned me to the presence of the Juge
d'Instruction: whom I found to be a portly
magistrate, with a bald head, a black satin waistcoat,
and a large bunch of seals. He was sitting in a
comfortable apartment, half office, half sitting-
room, and at the table opposite to him sat his
greffier, or secretary, likewise portly, black satin
waistcoated and gold-sealed, but not bald headed.
He looked like the judge's nephew, and he
probably stood in that degree of relationship to
him. I was bowed to, and offered a chair when I
entered, and then judge and greffier, or uncle and
nephew, began to chat about the jewel robbery,
and politics, and theatricals, and the extraordinary
fact of my being an Englishman. Now and
then I was asked a casual question relative to my
transactions with Yan Prig; but at the end of
some five-and-twenty minutes' desultory conversation,
I was astounded to hear the greffier—who
had been apparently scribbling caricatures on his
blotting pad while we were talking—clear his
voice and read a high-flown narrative, in the first
person—my own—of the "Affaire de la Porte de
Cologne." I think the exercitation commenced
thus:

"I am unable to state with any degree of
certainty whether it was on the right or the left side
of the row of poplars opposite the Porte, dite de
Cologne, that on the night, or rather morning
of——"

He went on, for I am sure half an hour. Then,
the pair having worked their wicked will on
me, told me that I was to come again that day
week, to be confronted with the "prévenu," not
yet "accuse" Van Prig; and that then I was
to prepare myself to attend the Court of Assizes
of Brabant, of which the sittings would probably
take place one month thence. Then they gave
me tenpence—a franc—for my "time." This I
gratefully accepted, as an instalment on my five-
and-twenty francs, and my "bonny money."

It was my own fault that I never recovered
my property. I wonder where it is now, and what
they did with Van Prig! I know perfectly well
what I did. I happened to have a second
passport in my possession, a right good Foreign-office
one. The first, a mere Black Eagle affair, I
allowed to slumber peacefully in the custody of
the police, in its pigeon-hole at the Petits Sablons.
I went home, packed up my needments, made the
landlady a present of the three-handed Madonna,
purchased a lot of bear's-grease as a bonus for
not stopping longer, and by the eight o'clock
tram from the Station des Bogards started for
the town of Lille, in France. The tables were
turned, and I had run away from Mynheer van
Prig.

Was he convicted on the strength of my high-
flown narrative? Was I condemned "en
contumace" for cutting the prosecution, so far as I
was concerned, "short?" Did van Prig get off
scot free? I have never been informed. I have
passed through Brussels once since, on my way
to the Rhine, but I didn't call upon "MM. les
Juges d'Instruction" in their cabinets. I have
had my pocket picked, too, occasionally, at
Epsom, in the Strand, and on railway platforms,
but I am delighted to say that the British
Mynheer van Prig has always been clever enough,
in my case, to defy pursuit and evade discovery,
and that I have never since been subjected to the
intolerable nuisance of prosecuting him.