threw a bright spot of light on the card, which Thorndyke had been
examining when I knocked, as I gathered from the position of the chair,
which he now pushed back against the wall.

"I see you have commenced work on our problem," I remarked as, in
response to a double ring of the electric bell, Polton entered with the
materials for our repast.

"Yes," answered Thorndyke. "I have opened the campaign, supported, as
usual, by my trusty chief-of-staff; eh! Polton?"

The little man, whose intellectual, refined countenance and dignified
bearing seemed oddly out of character with the tea-tray that he carried,
smiled proudly, and, with a glance of affectionate admiration at my
friend, replied--

"Yes, sir. We haven't been letting the grass grow under our feet.
There's a beautiful negative washing upstairs and a bromide enlargement
too, which will be mounted and dried by the time you have finished your
breakfast."

"A wonderful man that, Jervis," my friend observed as his assistant
retired. "Looks like a rural dean or a chancery judge, and was obviously
intended by Nature to be a professor of physics. As an actual fact he
was first a watchmaker, then a maker of optical instruments, and now he
is mechanical factotum to a medical jurist. He is my right-hand, is
Polton; takes an idea before you have time to utter it--but you will
make his more intimate acquaintance by-and-by."

"Where did you pick him up?" I asked.